Catherine Cookson Biography and List of Works

British writer who published over 90 highly popular novels which have been translated into twenty languages, among others into Finnish (over 30). In the 1990s Cookson's books have been sold 90 million copies. Especially famous Cookson became for her family sagas set against the backdrop of England in the 19th century. She wrote under the pseudonym Catherine Marchant, and produced three different series of books: the Bill Bailey series, Mary Ann series, and the Mallen series.

"I was a story-teller from the time I could talk..."

Catherine Cookson was born in Tyne Dock, Co. Durham, an industrial region in the northeast of England. Unlike so many leading writers, she started life with many disadvantages. She was born illegitimate. Her mother was poverty-stricken, at times an alcoholic and occasionally violent. Cookson had only the minimum of education, and from the age of thirteen she suffered from hereditary haemorrhagic telangiectasia. For many years Cookson believed that she had been abandoned as a baby and that her mother was actually her older sister.

From the early age Cookson was determined to become a writer. She was an avid reader and wrote her first short story, THE WILD IRISH GIRL, when she was eleven, and sent it off to the South Shields Gazette, which returned it after three days. At the age of thirteen Cookson left school. She began working as a maid in the houses of the rich and powerful, witnessing the great class barrier inside the wealthy society. From 1924 to 1929 she worked in a laundry and saved money to establish an apartment hotel in Hastings. One of the tenants was schoolmaster Tom Cookson, whom she married in 1940 at the age of 34. After several miscarriages she fell in depression and started to write to recover. She joined the local writers' group for encouragement, and changed from play writing to short stories. Cookson's first book, KATE HANNIGAN (1950), was partly autobiographical. Her neighbours tried to stop its publication because Cookson dared in the first pages write detailed about a baby being born. In the story Kate, a working-class girl, becomes pregnant by an upper-middle-class man. The child is brought up by Kate's parents and she believes them to be her real parents, and Kate to be her sister.

COLOUR BLIND (1953) was a story of a woman who marries a black man. Later their daughter suffers at the hands of classmates and a bitter uncle. The background is realistic, and offers an understanding picture of the British working class. In this works as in the following books Cookson dealt with such social issues as class tensions and unemployment, among them THE BLACK CANDLE (1989), set in the 19th-century and depicting a clash between two families.

Her first sixteen books Cookson wrote longhand, but started then to use a tape recorder, acting the parts of the characters she is writing about. Her husband worked as her private secretary and aided in grammar and spelling - Cookson's dialect was so strong that many outsiders had difficulties to understand what she said. In 1968 her novel THE ROUND TOWER won an award as the best regional novel of the year.

Many of Cookson's novels concern the poverty in the North East of England, and are set in mines and shipyards, or the farms and surrounding countryside in various periods from the nineteenth century onwards. The historical background is generally carefully researched. She also used her own experiences as material and recollections of her family and friends. Several novels are serialized, tracing events in the life of a single character or a family. Mary Ann Shaughnessy, brave and a warm-hearted heroine, appears in many books. Her other major series are The Mallen Family, Tilly Trotter, Hamilton, and Bill Bailey. Cookson's autobiography OUR KATE, was published in 1969.

Usually Cookson's characters cross the class barrier by the means of education. Tilly Trotter is taught to read and write by the parson's daughter and Kate Hannigan is educated by a kindly employer. The local villagers view Tilly as a witch, and during the story she moves up and down the social scale.

The trilogy dealing the Mallen family saga began with THE MALLEN STREAK (1973), and continued with THE MALLEN GIRL (1974), and THE MALLEN LOT (1974). The story was set in the 19th-century Northumberland, and depicted the affairs of the family against the background of hidden sins of the past.

Cookson received the Freedom of the Borough of South Shields, and honorary degree from the university of Newcastle, and the Royal Society of Literature's award for the Best Regional Novel of the Year. The Variety Club of Great Britain named her Writer of the Year, and she was voted Personality of The North-East. In 1933 Cookson was made dame. She died shortly before her ninety-second birthday, on June 11, 1998, in her home near Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Posthumously published KATE HANNIGAN'S GIRL (1999) continues the story of her first novel.

For further information: Now read on... by Mandy Hicken and Ray Prytherch (1996); Contemporary Popular Writers, ed. by David Mote (1997); Catherine Cookson DBE, OBE in Bestsellers: Top Writers Tell How by Richard Joseph (1997); Catherine Cookson Country; in Newcastle the Ocean Road Museum and Art Gallery in South Shields has a reconstruction of William Black Street, where Catherine Cookson grew up. - Note: A third of all fiction borrowed from public libraries in 1988 in the UK was by Catherine Cookson. In 1997 nine of her works were on the list of ten most borrowed books.

"But he had taught her to love, and that was a different thing; he had taught her that the act of love wasn't merely a physical thing, its pleasure being halved without the assistance of the mind. But it was Mr Burgess, this old man breathing his last here now, who had taught her how to use her mind. Right from the beginning he had warned her that once your mind took you below the surface of mundane things, you would never again know real peace because the mind was an adventure, it led you into strange places and was forever asking why, and as the world outside could not give you true answers, you were forever groping and searching through your spirit for the truth."
(from Tilly Trotter Wed, 1981)

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Mary Ann Shaughnessy series

The Mallen Family - televisin series The Mallens (1978-80)

Tilly Trotter

Bill Bailey

Others

Books by Catherine Cookson