Catherine Cookson: The Biography - Softcover

One of the most popular writers of the 20th century, Catherine Cookson's story is as dramatic as any of her novels. Born in 1906, the illegitimate daughter of a domestic servant, she was brought up in Tyneside in one of the poorest communities of the western world. Her mother once begged barefoot from door to door and they lived in constant fear of the workhouse. But Catherine was determined to escape her situation and did so with enormous courage and energy, making her her way out of the slums of her childhood. After a tragic series of stillbirths and miscarriages, she attempted to "write it all out". All of her 97 novels are still in print. But the damage she suffered as a child left Cookson vulnerable and her health precarious. In this biography, Kathleen Jones has delved into early drafts of Cookson's own autobiography, and has also used as background the hours of privately taped conversation in which Cookson discusses much that she chose to keep secret in her own lifetime: her tortured feelings for her mother, her own mental torment and terrors, and her intense and devastating relationship with Nan Smith, who almost succeeded in wrecking Catherine's marriage.

Kathleen Jones was born in 1947 and brought up in the Lake District where she now lives. She spent eleven years in Africa and the Middle East, before returning to England and writing her first biography in 1991. Other biographies followed and she has written short fiction, journalism and a collection of poetry.