My fantasy novella stars (alongside humans and a very urbane dragon) twin cats kept by the two heroes' foster-mother, a fierce farm dog that menaces the heroes after they sleep in a barn, an aristocratic horse belonging to the persecuted warrior who befriends them, and the winged pigs on which...
Welcome! I am also an indy author for whom Shakespeare and Austen are congenial topics, although I'm much more familiar with the former than the latter!
In the 1980s, L. Neil Smith wrote a trilogy of Lando Calrissian novels. The third contained one of my all-time favourite sentences from a book: "Unlike a fictional villain, Rokur Gepta had not gloated and revealed his plans to Lando Calrissian." !