Catherine Cookson

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Catherine Ann Cookson, DBE (née McMullen, 1906–1998) was a British author.

She is ranked in the top 20 of the most widely read British novelists, with revenues approaching 100 million, despite maintaining a relatively low profile in the world of celebrity writers.

She was inspired by her experiences as a child in South Tyneside, North East England, which was the setting for her books.

She is one of the most prolific British novelists with more than 103 titles published in her own name or two other pen names (see Bibliography).

Early life

Catherine Ann Davies, born on June 20, 1906, at 5 Leam Lane in South Shields, England. As a child, she was identified as "Katie" and was a female. She moved to East Jarrow, which would be the setting for one of her best-known books, The Fifteen Streets. Kate Fawcett, an alcoholic, grew up believing her unmarried mother was her sister when she was brought up by her grandparents, Rose and John McMullen. Kathleen Jones, a biographer from Lanarkshire, Scotland, tracked down her father, Alexander Davies, a bigamist and gambler from Alexander Davies.

She left school at the age of 14 and began a life of domestic service at Harton Workhouse in South Shields. She moved south to Hastings Workhouse in 1929, saving every penny on a large Victorian home and then taking in lodgers to supplement her income.

She married Tom Cookson, a Hastings Grammar School teacher, in June 1940, at the age of 34. It was discovered that she was suffering from a rare vascular disease, telangiectasia, which causes bleeding from the nose, fingers, and stomach, as well as anaemia. Following the miscarriages, she suffered for a decade before recovering.

Later life and death

Cookson and her partner Tom returned to the North East in Jesmond, Newcastle upon Tyne, where they became first. They then moved to Corbridge, a market town near Newcastle, and later to Langley, Northumberland, a small village nearby. For the final time, they travelled back to Jesmond in 1989 to be nearer to medical facilities. She was bedridden for the past few years of her life, and she gave her final TV interview to North East Tonight, the regional ITV Tyne Tees news show, from her sickbed. Mike Neville took over the event.

Cookson died at the age of 91, just 16 days before her 92nd birthday. Many of her books were written from her sickbed and were not published posthumously until 2002. Tom's husband died just 17 days later on June 28, 1998. He had been hospitalized for a week, but the reason for his death had yet to be revealed. He was 85 years old at the time.

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Writing career

She took up writing as a form of therapy, in order to tackle her depression, and became a founding member of Hastings Writers' Group. Her first novel, Kate Hannigan, was published in 1950. Though it was labelled a romance, she expressed discontent with the stereotype. Her books were, she said, historical novels about people and conditions she knew. Cookson had little connection with the London literary circus. She was always more interested in practising the art of writing. Her research could be uncomfortable—going down a mine, for instance, because her heroine came from a mining area. Having in her youth wanted to write about 'above stairs' in grand houses, she later and successfully concentrated on people ground down by circumstances, taking care to know them well.

Cookson wrote almost 100 books, which sold more than 123 million copies, her novels being translated into at least 20 languages. She also wrote books under the pseudonyms Catherine Marchant and a name derived from her childhood name, Katie McMullen. She remained the most borrowed author from public libraries in the UK for 17 years, up until four years after her death, losing the top spot to Jacqueline Wilson only in 2002.

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