The Uncivilised Cat was painted in 1930, either when Miller Parker and McCance left their life in London, or upon their move to Gregynog, in the Welsh town of Powys. The still life captures the animal’s restlessness and alarm. It has landed upon the open pages of Marie Stopes’ Love’s Creation, and is just visible to the viewer. Published in 1928, the year women obtained the right to vote, Stopes works through several debates which affected both her personal and public life as a woman:  sexual relations, the link between the arts and sciences, and the quest for female sexual fulfilment. The pound note on which the cat’s claw is protectively placed acknowledges the female plight for financial freedom. A toppled vase of Calla lilies and a broken Venus statuette draw attention to the story of Venus, Roman goddess of love, seeing lilies for the first time. Jealous of their beauty, she cursed them by placing a large yellow pistil in the middle. The Calla lily, in this context, represents the lust and sexuality that Miller Parker suggests a woman can never have.

The spine of the green book indistinctly reads Good-Bye to All That (1929), an autobiography by Robert Graves. "It was my bitter leave-taking of England" he wrote, “where I had recently broken a good many conventions". Good-Bye to All That describes the passing of an old order following the cataclysm of the First World War; the subsequent disillusionment of the glories of patriotism, combined with the gradual increased interest in atheism, feminism and socialism in a post-war British society, all signify monumental fissures in British collective thought. These rifts undoubtedly impacted both Miller Parker’s personal and artistic outlook; The Uncivilised Cat exudes this uncertainty, particularly in its rejection of the Victorian tropes of womanhood as ‘The Angel of The Home’.   

By 1925, the couple became part of the Chiswick Group, which included the Mitchisons, Blair Hughes Stanton (1902-1981) and his wife, Gertrude Hermes (1901–1983). While Miller Parker had taught herself the rudiments of wood-engraving, it was Hughes-Stanton and Hermes who encouraged and refined her talent. In 1928, both couples had a major joint exhibition of their painting and sculpture at St George's Gallery, London. Their modernism unsettled one uncomprehending critic, who observed that 'eccentricity ran riot with rather lamentable results!' (Studio, 95, 1928, 344).

In spite of this, both couples continued to intertwine the personal with the professional, moving to  the Gregynog Press, in Powys, Wales, in 1930. The press was dedicated to producing fine books in limited editions. McCance was to be the controller and the others artist-illustrators. The Fables of Esope (1932) and XXI Welsh Gypsy Folk-Tales (1933), illustrated by Miller Parker’s engravings, are among the finest of the period. Paradoxically, Miller Parker felt many of the books hardly needed 'decoration': 'so many of the jobs that I get to do I feel ought not to have been illustrated. [Thomas] Hardy describes so well that illustrations seem to be superfluous' (Rogerson, Agnes Miller Parker: Wood Engraver, 46).

After the successes of the 1930s, finances were precarious. Thanks to the triumphs of her engravings, Miller Parker's work was more widely recognised than that of her husband. This undoubtedly gave rise to further tensions in her relationship with McCance. Personal correspondence with friends suggest that he became increasingly lazy and selfish in the years prior to the breakdown of their marriage. (Agnes Miller Parker inventory, Manuscripts Division, National Library of Scotland). This increasing unhappiness culminated in 1955, when Miller Parker made the decision to leave her husband. Divorce at this time was highly stigmatised, heightened by the reality that she took the decision to break away from the institution of marriage, and the traditional role of womanhood as a wife. Finalised in 1963, the divorce drew Miller Parker back to Scotland, where she settled in Arran.