Debbie Jabbour - Catherine Cookson: A Biography

Catherine Cookson is one of the most popular and most read English authors of all time, with more than 100 million books sold. She didn't begin writing until she was in her forties, doing so as a form of therapy after a miscarriage and subsequent mental breakdown. Her writing was informed by personal experience, but Cookson was also at heart both a feminist and a socialist. Although many critics, particularly male ones, put down her work as nothing more than romance fiction, in reality she addressed profound social issues that impacted the poor working class in Britain during the beginning of the 20th century. These conditions had a particular impact on women. Cookson was able to write authoritatively because she herself experienced extreme poverty and hardship as a child, yet through hard work and determination was able to take an alternative path in life.

Her personal story is retold in countless variations through her novels. Although she did write several autobiographies and books specifically about her own life, each Cookson novel replicates the tale of a heroine who is disadvantaged in some way by the circumstances of her birth and goes on to succeed through hard work and personal conviction. Although Cookson wrote her first story at the age of 11, she did not embrace writing as a career until she was in her 40s, and it wasn't until some ten years later that she finally began to enjoy the financial benefits.

With over 100 novels written and sales estimated as high as 125 million worldwide, Cookson is one of the most widely read authors in the United Kingdom. Many of her works have been converted to stage, film, radio, and television. She had great success with television, with some 18 books adapted for TV between 1990 and 2001. The first was The Fifteen Streets , which was nominated for an Emmy in 1990, followed by The Black Velvet Gown , which won the Emmy for Best Drama in 1991. Cookson's works also were filmed as a television miniseries which lasted more than a decade and continues to be shown on specialty channels.

Her extremely difficult early life circumstances did more than just inspire her writing, however, Cookson was a philanthropist, a feminist, and a social activist. She donated generously to over 100 causes, including medical research, cultural ventures, services to young people, and benefits to other writers. She gave generously to the University of Newcastle, and in recognition they named a medical faculty building after her. Cookson, of course, never had the opportunity to attend university, although when she discovered the public library in her 20s, which became a special center of learning for her.

In Cookson's life she experienced the impact of social class distinctions. She grew up in Tynsdale, one of the poorest areas of Britain, and her childhood was marred by abuse, violence, alcoholism, shame, and guilt. She developed self-destructive tendencies and struggled throughout her life with depression. She was always determined to escape, and when she married, she also mimicked the breakdown of social class barriers reflected in her books. Her husband, Tom, was a graduate of Oxford and a schoolteacher, who used his education to help her write her books. The heroine who is helped by others to educate herself on her road out of poverty is a common feature of Cookson's novels.

As a little girl, living in poverty with her grandparents, dealing with an abusive and alcoholic mother, Cookson used to hide in the backyard lavatory, dreaming of one day living in her own home. Her drive to succeed and her hard work allowed her to purchase her first home at the age of 27, a rooming house which she then used as a source of income. In her 40s, Cookson used personal tragedy as a springboard into writing, which served as therapy. From there she gradually found incredible success as an author. For much of the second half of her life, she lived as a multi-millionaire and one of Britain's richest women. From her boarding house, she went on to live in a 13-room stone-built mansion overlooking three acres of garden and a lake. Hers was a true rags-to-riches tale right out of one of her novels.

Cookson was born Catherine Ann McMullen on June 27, 1906 to unwed single mother, Kate Fawcett, who was an often-violent alcoholic. Nicknamed Kate, she was raised in the home of her grandparents Rose and John McMullen at East Jarrow, County Durham in the North of England. The family was poor and struggled. Because of the stigma of having a child out of wedlock, Cookson was told that her grandmother Rose was her mother, and that her mother was her sister. She didn't discover the truth until she was seven years old, a revelation which scarred her profoundly. Cookson never knew her father, although biographer Kathleen Jones eventually tracked him down, identifying him as Lancashire bigamist and gambler Alexander Davies, a Scot who came to Tyneside searching for better opportunities .

Cookson was determined to become independent and escape the environment of wretched poverty. She wrote her first short story, The Wild Irish Girl, when she was just 11 years old, submitting it for publication in the South Shields Gazette , but it was rejected. At age 13 she left school and went out to work as a domestic servant, a position which provided plenty of experience in class divisions. When Cookson was 20, a novel inspired her to enter a public library for the first time in her life, and she was transformed. She spent hours in the library from then on, later referring to the public library as her university.

As part of her drive to succeed, Cookson took voice lessons to learn to control her Geordie accent, which was so strong that most people couldn't understand her. In 1929 she traveled to the south of England to Hastings, where she took a position as head laundress in a workhouse. She vowed never to return to her former life and home. Cookson went through cultural growing pains during her years in Hastings. She worked hard to live the life of a working class girl, but this was complicated by a relationship she developed with Nan Smyth, a possibly bisexual woman. For a time Cookson also allowed her alcoholic mother to live with her, which created further problems .

However, Cookson worked hard and saved her money. After four years she managed to purchase The Hurst, a Victorian mansion with 14 bedrooms which served as a boarding house for working people, a "gentlemen's residence." With Nan and her mother's help she ran the boarding house for several years. In 1936, when she was 34, she finally developed her first serious relationship with a man. Tom Cookson was a school teacher and Oxford graduate who had been a lodger in her boarding house. He was five years younger and both called it love at first sight .

Tom was physically a small man, and his personality was gentle yet firm. He was genuinely interested in other people, and Cookson's attraction to him may have also been based in her need for a father figure. They married in 1940, and the marriage was apparently a happy one, lasting until 1998 when both died within days of each other.

The one disappointment in the marriage was Cookson's failure to have children. After the premature stillbirth of their first child, Cookson suffered four more miscarriages. With the fourth miscarriage doctors finally diagnosed the problem. Cookson had Hereditary Hemorrhagic Telangiectasia (HHT), a rare genetic blood disorder which had first manifest itself when she was a teenager experiencing regular nose bleeds. With the disorder there is a significant risk of life-threatening complications and potential for a rupture of blood vessels and brain hemorrhage, particularly during pregnancy.