User:Allison M/sandbox

About Touch Not the Cat, Mary Stewart wrote that 'it was to be an interleaving of past and present, a sort of fugue in time where two generations lived and moved at the same time, seeing each other from

time to time like ghosts. I wasn't quite sure how to work it, but that was in my mind when I started to write. But then, when I began to draft the first chapter, out of the blue came the first sentence, and with it the

theme of telepathy.'

'the vicar who is to some extent a portrait of my own father'

She also described Touch Not the Cat as 'a modern adventure story spiced with romance (or romance spiced with adventure; it depends whether you are advertising it for men or for women)' Jenny Brown, in her STV interview of Mary Stewart in 1992, called the books 'adventure thrillers'.

in the United States, Touch Not the Cat was the 9th highest selling book of 1976.

Intertextuality
Mary Stewart usually uses chapter headings in her books that are quotations from literary works. In Touch Not the Cat, these quotes are all from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Many other literary allusions add depth to the story. These include

Walter de la Mare - quote from his poem 'The Riddlers' precedes the story; and the 'lamps of peace' that Bryony refers to is from his poem 'Trees'.