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Catherine Cookson was born in Tyne Dock, the illegitimate daughter of a poverty-stricken woman, Kate, whom she believed to be her older sister. She began work in service but eventually moved south to Hastings, where she met and married Tom Cookson, a local grammar-school master. Although she was originally acclaimed as a regional writer - her novel The Round Tower won the Winifred Holtby Award for the best regional novel of 1968 - her readership quickly spread throughout the world, and her many best-selling novels established her as one of the most popular of contemporary women novelists. After receiving an OBE in 1985, Catherine Cookson was created a Dame of the British Empire in 1993. She was appointed an Honorary Fellow of St Hilda's College, Oxford, in 1997. For many years she lived near Newcastle upon Tyne. She died shortly before her ninety-second birthday, in June 1998.
If Mrs. Cookson's autobiography strikes you as embarrassing in its strenuous recital of lifetime grudges, remember that not only has the British author's real-rags-to-considerable-comfort career been translated into an immensely saleable product, but also there's no doubt she had something to complain about. Born into poverty, the illegitimate daughter of our Kate, a mistreated but loving girl with a drinking problem, Mrs. Cookson, like many of her heroines, inched her way upward after a childhood of taunts, humiliations and trips to the pub. With a formidable determination she worked at menial jobs, became a laundry manager, took in boarders, and finally married the saintly Mr. Cookson. Her writing - and how she struggled for self-taught schooling! - began in middle age and it was only then, after bouts with physical and mental illness, that she was able to view compassionately, and with some objectivity, her relationship with her mother who lived long enough to witness her daughter's success. It's all the fevered and harried unburdening of a self-made woman who has never taken her fists away from her face for the larger view. But those attuned to Mrs. Cookson's latest novel, The Dwelling Place (p. 127) will want to read this. (Kirkus Reviews)
