Another favorite image that Montgomery preserved in her scrapbooks was the cat. She was enthralled with cats, taking their pictures, clipping bits of their fur to preserve in the scrapbook, cutting out pages of photographs of them from magazines. She and George Boyd MacMillan in Scotland shared this fascination for cats, exchanging anecdotes throughout their thirty-nine-year correspondence. In her journals and letters Montgomery talked most often of Daffy and Lucky.

Montgomery cut out articles about cats and pasted those, too, into the scrapbooks. One such piece shows an engraving of Madame Ronner's cat Banjo. Did Montgomery have this image in mind when she revised her manuscript of The Blue Castle and changed one of Barney's cats from the name "Jiggle Squeak" to "Banjo"? It is fitting, perhaps, that the very last entry in the scrapbooks, in 1937, is a comic article about a cat. Mr. MacMillan, no doubt, had sent her the British clipping about a huge, ex-movie-star, whiskey-drinking cat named Matthew of Greengables, who answered to the name of Marilla! Cats were so beloved by Montgomery that she even added a black cat to her signature.

[for more information on Montgomery's visual imagination, please see Dr. Elizabeth R. Epperly's chapter "L.M. Montgomery's Visual Imagination" in the University of Toronto Press (2002) publication Making Avonlea: L.M. Montgomery and Popular Culture, edited by Dr. Irene Gammel. For more details about book covers see Andrea McKenzie's chapter in the same book. For more information about Montgomery and photography, please see The Bend in the Road, CD-ROM, available through lmmontgomery.ca]