What are cats saying when they speak? At the turn of the last century, Kathryn Hughes writes this morning on the NYR Online, that question preoccupied novelists, authors of short fiction, a range of small-mammal enthusiasts, and at least one purported linguist who sought to translate “the feline language” into English.

In some pieces of fiction, Hughes writes, talking cats were possessed of “an overweening sense of moral superiority”; in others they were enlisted “to recount their tragic life stories as a way of exposing the brutal conditions of their existence.” Often they were the objects of considerable anxiety: “for if the modern cat knew its name and could ask for food when hungry, who was to say that, when your back was turned, it wasn’t gossiping about you?”

Below, alongside Hughes’s article—an excerpt from her new book Catland, out today from Johns Hopkins University Press—we have compiled a selection of writing from the archives about cats and their mysterious habits.

Kathryn Hughes
Written by Paw

In novels and magazines from the turn of the last century, cats started speaking their minds. What if they were talking about us?

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Gregory Hays
Meow!

Cats refute the claim that the unexamined life is not worth living, by living it.

—June 22, 2023

Daniel Drake
The Slog Comes in on Little Cat Feet

Cats the movie stubbornly refuses to behave, to conform to what is asked of it, preferring to spend long stretches alienating the audience, only to return every now and then to demand affection.

—January 4, 2020

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Vivian Gornick
Cats, Doris Lessing, and Me

“Some months ago, late on a winter afternoon, I picked up Particularly Cats again. This time, I read it through in a single sitting, hardly able to believe that I had once held this book in my hands and not been similarly compelled.”

—August 27, 2018

Natalie Angier
The Killer Cats Are Winning!

Are cats an environmental menace?

—September 29, 2016

Desmond Morris
CATS

To enjoy the company of a cat, we must be prepared to forgo our dominant pack leader role, and adopt a more modest position.

—November 3, 1994

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