Emma Thiébaut

In the spring of 2023, I took a trip to Boston to visit the Jewett collection at the Houghton library. It was my first time dealing with archives of any kind, so I didn’t quite know how to go about it, and proceeded to look for the word “cat” in the Jewett catalogue. Although this is probably the stupidest way I could have done things, I came across an item called “The Kittens’ Gloves” that didn’t ring any bells—and requested it.

The paper was very thin and the handwriting a bit careless—probably because Jewett didn’t mean this fragment to be read be anyone!—so it took quite a few hours to decipher the folded sheet of text.

But lo and behold, it was an incomplete, revised first draft of a short story about kittens being ordered to wear gloves in the summer, for protection against sunburns. Beginners’ sheerest luck. It wasn’t referenced in any scholarship on Jewett, or even on the SOJ Text Project, and I was delighted to be one of the few to know Jewett had penned such a bizarrely funny idea about kittens having to wear gloves in the summer.

Then I came back to France and completely forgot about it for a whole year!

It’s only when I was asked to propose something for the 2024 Jewett conference, organized in Paris by my advisor, that the fragment resurfaced in my mind. I still didn’t quite know what to do with it—it was too short, too loose, and my transcription too messy—, but I wanted to write about Jewett’s kitten stories.

Out of curiosity, I got in touch with Terry Heller to ask if he remembered coming across the fragment. Very quickly he took my mess of a transcription to fine tune it and offered to add it to the SOJ Text Project. It was an absolute joy to see something that had sit so messily on my computer for so long be made into the proper transcriptions I’d seen many times on the SOJ Text Project, to have contributed a tiny bit to this wonderful recording of Jewett’s work.

So, now you can find this bizarre little bit of a story here!

As for my paper for the Jewett conference, I ultimately made it about “The Kitten’s Ghost”, but expect something about “The Kittens’ Gloves” soon…