Catherine Cookson

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Standard Name: Cookson, Catherine
Birth Name: Catherine McMullen
Nickname: Kitty
Pseudonym: Catherine Marchant
Married Name: Catherine Cookson
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 When CC died she had completed 104 works, nine of them still unpublished.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

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Intertextuality and Influence Maggie Gee
Her central figure, Alfred White, a park-keeper in a London borough based on that of Brent, is an old-fashioned ex-soldier who combines integrity, compassion, and intense pride in his job, with a violent temper...
Literary responses Ethel M. Dell
In response to a compliment on her writing EMD replied, they are not well written and will never be called classics.
qtd. in
Dell, Penelope. Nettie and Sissie. Hamish Hamilton, 1977.
129
Highbrow journals at her death were careful not to praise. The Times Literary...
Literary responses Eva Figes
In a brief review for The Times, Jacky Gillott entirely ignored the novel's form while contrasting its tone, to its disadvantage, with Susan Hill 's In the Springtime of the Year. She found...
Literary responses Mary Wesley
Anita Brookner 's review in the Spectator must have been a blow: she likened Wesley's work to that of Catherine Cookson and Agatha Christie , calling it stereotyped, nostalgic, reassuring, romantic, tasteful, well-bred, very slight...
Performance of text Claire Luckham
Kitty and Kate, a play by CL about the popular novelist Catherine Cookson , had its world premiere at the New Vic Theatre at Newcastle under Lyme in Staffordshire.
“The Life of Catherine Cookson Comes to the New Vic Theatre in World Premiere Production”. New Vic Press Release, Jan. 2005.
Times. Times Publishing Company.
(25 Jan 2005): 17
Author summary Claire Luckham
Claire Luckham's career as a playwright was launched in 1976, when the feminist theatre group Monstrous Regiment selected Scum (a play on which she and her husband collaborated) to open their first season. Her plays...
Publishing Mary Wesley
At this time Transworld made MWthe first serious writer to be sold as though she were Catherine Cookson [whom they also published] in a full-blooded, commercial way. In May 1989 they had reprinted four...
Textual Production Michelene Wandor
MW has specialized in adapting and abridging novels for radio. Between 1980 and 2004 she adapted a wide array of fiction by women writers, including works by Jane Austen , Charlotte Brontë , George Eliot

Timeline

By April 1774: Lord Chesterfield's Letters to his Son Philip...

Writing climate item

By April 1774

Lord Chesterfield 's Letters to his Son Philip Stanhope were posthumously published by his daughter-in-law Eugenia ; her omission of all material relating to herself gave rise to the story that he had not known...

Texts

Cookson, Catherine. A Dinner of Herbs. Heinemann, 1985.
Cookson, Catherine. A Grand Man. Macdonald, 1954.
Cookson, Catherine. Catherine Cookson Country. Heinemann, 1986.
Cookson, Catherine. Colour Blind. Macdonald, 1953.
Cookson, Catherine. Fenwick Houses. Macdonald, 1960.
Cookson, Catherine. Hamilton. Heinemann, 1983.
Cookson, Catherine. Kate Hannigan. Macdonald, 1950.
Cookson, Catherine. Katie Mulholland. MacDonald, 1967.
Cookson, Catherine. Let Me Make Myself Plain: A Personal Anthology. Bantam, 1988.
Cookson, Catherine. Our Kate. Macdonald, 1969.
Cookson, Catherine. Plainer Still: A New Personal Anthology. Bantam, 1995.
Cookson, Catherine. Rooney. Macdonald, 1957.
Cookson, Catherine. Rosie of the River. Bantam, 2000.
Cookson, Catherine. Rosie of the River. Corgi, 2001.
Cookson, Catherine. The Black Candle. Bantam, 1989.
Cookson, Catherine. The Bonny Dawn. Bantam, 1996.
Cookson, Catherine. The Fifteen Streets. Macdonald, 1952.
Cookson, Catherine. The Round Tower. MacDonald, 1968.
Cookson, Catherine. Tilly Trotter. Heinemann, 1982, 3 vols.