Catherine Cookson

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As a later twentieth-century novelist, CC broke records for popularity. On some tallies her number of novels passes one hundred, in addition to children's books and volumes of autobiography. Fiction and autobiography often overlap in her work: her plots and characters frequently draw on her own or her mother's experience of deprivation, illegitimacy, violence, rejection, and the struggle to survive financially and emotionally. When CC died she had completed 104 works, nine of them still unpublished.
Cookson, Catherine. Rosie of the River. Bantam, 2000.
prelims and back jacket
Jones, Kathleen. Catherine Cookson: The Biography. Constable, 1999.
3, 216, 260-1, 320
  • BirthName: Catherine McMullen
    Though her birth certificate recorded her name as Catherine Ann Davies after the alleged name of her unknown father, she grew up as Catherine McMullen, after her maternal grandmother's second married surname. Her mother's surname, Fawcett, came from her grandmother's first married name. The true name of Catherine's father is not known.
    Jones, Kathleen. Catherine Cookson: The Biography. Constable, 1999.
    13-14, 17, 22

  • Nickname: Kitty
    Catherine's family called her Kitty, or occasionally Katie, to distinguish her from her mother, our Kate.

  • Married: Cookson
    Of her married name she later said: He made an illegitimate legitimate by giving me his name.
    qtd. in
    Jones, Kathleen. Catherine Cookson: The Biography. Constable, 1999.
    152
  • Pseudonym: Catherine Marchant

Milestones

20 June 1906

Catherine McMullen (later CC ) was born an illegitimate child in Leam Lane, South Shields, near Tyne Dock.
Jones, Kathleen. Catherine Cookson: The Biography. Constable, 1999.
22-3

April 1969

CC published her first work of acknowledged autobiography: Our Kate, titled from her mother , not herself.
British Books in Print. J. Whitaker and Sons, 1874–1987.
1970
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
Jones, Kathleen. Catherine Cookson: The Biography. Constable, 1999.
237-8, 298-9

11 June 1998

CC died at ninety-one, after several years almost at death's door; her husband followed her within three weeks.
Jones, Kathleen. Catherine Cookson: The Biography. Constable, 1999.
323-4

Biography

Birth and Background

20 June 1906

Catherine McMullen (later CC ) was born an illegitimate child in Leam Lane, South Shields, near Tyne Dock.
Jones, Kathleen. Catherine Cookson: The Biography. Constable, 1999.
22-3

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