Catherine Cookson was an illegitimate child brought up in one of the poorest places in the western world. She left school at 13 to become a domestic servant and was later employed in a workhouse laundry. Yet she became one of the best selling novelists of all time and one of the richest women in Britain. Her story is as fascinating as any of her novels, with a plot that includes abandonment, abuse, alcoholism, extreme poverty, and a love affair that almost wrecked Catherine’s life and her marriage. She survived it all because she was driven by an ambition so strong it overcame everything to make her a household name. Drawing on tapes recorded by Catherine Cookson herself, personal testimony and original research, Kathleen Jones tells the story of Catherine Cookson’s life and goes on a quest to find her absent father – the enigmatic ‘Alexander Davies’.
Table of Content
Introduction: Invisible Lives
Part One: A Child of the Tyne, 1906-1918
Part Two: A Question of Belief, 1919-1939
Part Three: The Thinking Years, 1940-1950
Part Four: The Regional Novelist, 1948-1968
Part Five: Miracles, 1969-1998
Part Six: Finding Alexander Davies, 1998-2003
Bibliography
List of Illustrations
End Notes
About the author
Kathleen Jones is a Sunday Times best-selling novelist, biographer and poet living in the English Lake District. She is the author of more than fifteen books and is currently a Royal Literary Fund Fellow.Born and brought up on a small hill farm she spent more than ten years living in Africa and the Middle East, where she worked in English broadcasting. Her work has won a number of important prizes. ‘A Passionate Sisterhood’ (Virago) won the Barclays Bank Prize for Biography and her recent collection of poetry, ‘Not Saying Goodbye at Gate 21’ (Templar Poetry) won the Straid Award. Kathleen’s biography of Catherine Cookson (Times Warner) was in the top 10 bestseller lists for more than 8 weeks. She now lives in an old mill beside one of northern England’s major rivers and is a passionate environmentalist.
More ebooks from the same author(s) / Editor
46,734 Ebooks in this category
