Kathleen Jones’s Catherine Cookson (1906-98): historical and romance novelist & artist

Catherine and Tom Cookson, later in life writing together

Lichfield Cathedrale, a drawing by Catherine who during WW2 became a commercial artist

Dear friends and readers,

Having embarked on my summer project to read historical novels, popular, post-colonial, romance, time-traveling, rewritten (and all about them), I quickly came across the name of Catherine Cookson as a famously popular, widely-sold popular historical novelist. I had never heard of her, and when I tried to find out about her novels, I discovered from the packaging they were sold as silly women’s romances but from a website that they had real excellence and interest. Which was it? I queried the people on Women Writers Across the Ages at Yahoo and got no answer, so I decided to try Kathleen Jones’s biography of Cookson. After all Jones had written so superbly well of the women in Wordsworth, Coleridge’s and Southey’s lives and of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle.

When the book arrived, I started to read it, and quickly saw here was a third powerful biographical work of art about a woman whom everything around her conspired to turn into that proverbial rose who blushes unseen in the desert air, who withers and dies, about whom, whether distraught or not, no one cares, but who against all odds wrote her heart and intelligence out, fulfilled her gifts in visual art, and left a large body of valuable fiction and non-fiction (over 100 books). Cookson died an enormously rich, somewhat respected historical novelist, much beloved by women readers. She had had eventually the kindest of loving husbands but before that a grim grueling punitive life such that she never was able to free herself of depression, nervous anxiety and a need to reach other people as a form of compensation and release to herself and for others.

Back streets of Shields where Catherine grew up

Chapters 1-5 tell the story of Catherine’s devastatingly destructive childhood. Her family was impoverished and she illegitimate, her mother, Kate treated so ill, beaten and berated, she became alcoholic and embittered very early in life. No or very low paid employment, the lousiest hardest kinds of work for demeaning wages that don’t hold body and soul together. Catherine was Catherine was bullied and taunted in her schools: illegitimate; she got caught up with the ugly fierce bigotries between Catholics and Protestants. The book reminds me of Jones’s The Passionate Sisterhood in its very frank portraits of Cookson’s mother, grandfather (a total hypocrite, sexual abuser), grandmother (cold and mean, she makes Austen’s Mrs Norris look benign). It’s a wonder Catherine survived with any self-esteem, any strength, and could later on — after a strong nervous breakdown — pull herself together to aspire and create.

Chapter 5 tells of sexual abuse both Catherine and her mother Kate endured from the brother/uncle and the grandfather/father. We see that Kate, the mother’s response to all she had endured and was continuing to endure was to be so embittered, she struck out against her daughter and could not love anyone. Kate, the mother, did have a lover/companion for a while, but there seems to have been no relief for real.

Thinking about the text, I’d like to say that probably this life of a working class impoverished intelligent sensitive young woman in early 20th century is probably not unusual. What unusual is Jones’s refusal to mince words, to present reality under some kind of rose-colored glasses, stubbornly to present endless qualifications and justifications for the horrible outrageous conduct around the girl. Had Austen been able to read this book she might have been startled, but it would have (I like to think) commanded her respect.

By Catherine’s late teens (by which time she had her first hard job) she had begun to take books out of the library and write. She wrote short fictions on what paper she had and a couple of stories survive. Her earliest books mirror what happened to her in her childhood, the first published (later on) were electrifying successes. Interestingly, at the time she did not see that she was writing about what had happened to her literally; it was only when her mother pointed out to her that this was autobiography that she conceded she was writing from memory. It does appear to have been the case she erupted the basic or fundamental matter from her repressed consciousness and subconscious. Its popularity could be its function as releasing for readers all their real experience which much had been done to repress or tell them to see in ways that justified the way the world had treated them.

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Harton workhouse where Catherine worked as a laundress and checker of laundry

Her first jobs — Cookson’s. She got a job as a counter in a laundress place. She had real abilities. We are given enough to see how hard it was to be in such a place, how Catherine was at first disliked intensely and how she learned to make herself more socially acceptable by being more tolerant, laughing, accepting silently more of what she saw around her, we see her learning to disguise herself, going to take books from the library for the first time.

She was from a family where to take books from a library was an unusual and therefore suspicious act.

She endured terrible things: ostracism frank and brutal because of her illegitimacy; insulted to her face egregiously. She had to endure suspicion about her sexual behavior enough to make anyone choke and repress them altogether. All the while she and her mother were supporting men at home who tried to sexually use them (brother and father) and they dare not tell. Catherine did have a boyfriend and he humiliated her and was unfaithful and she thought that it was her duty to take it and to hope he’d change and eventually love and marry her. It seems she had the luck that he did not marry her. What a thrown away horrible life she would have had then for the pregnancies would have done her in immediately.

Perhaps most electrifying are the descriptions of the workhouses where some of this laundry work was done. Every punishment possible wreaked on people unlucky enough to end up there — and many did. Married couples treated like criminals if they wanted to have sex. Everyone continually monitored, supervised.

What makes people so cruel to one another? I ask myself can the powers that are turning the US and UK (and Germany and France and other places) back take us back to this? I know these cruelties are found in US prisons (terrible sexual abuse for women in prisons nowadays). I know the military endorses vicious values today. I meant to see the Danish film, In A Better World as it were to endorse its critical exposure of bullying but it was on at such a bad time for me during the day and now is gone from the theaters altogether.

Hastings by the sea, down south

She left the head laundress of a workhouse job (that’s what she rose to) in her home area and moved to Hastings. This was once and again is a spa, vacation resort. It has a lot of history, from a castle left over from the battle of Hastings, to 18th century spa, to lower middle to anguished poverty (Catherine Cookson’s time) to today a renewed holiday place. It’s like Rome then a palimpsest.

Again Catherine confronted the cruelties and counter cruelties of the work house system. She did make a loving friend, a woman who was probably a lesbian and it seems that there is no evidence that is clear that Catherine and Nan Smith were lovers says Jones. At the same time Jones says they slept together. I think she is being discreet in order not to offend still living relatives and the estate. The friendship with Nan was good for her, but not what resulted: Nan followed conventional norms otherwise (outside her sexual orientation), and the mother, Kate, was in trouble.

But then Catherine made a bad mistake. She allowed her mother to come to Hastings and stay for long periods of time. Nan turned into a jealous horror, and before you know it the mother’s conduct deteriorated into cold abusive behavior. The mother was exasperating, apparently dense and passionate as ever, and Nan became overtly dominant and manipulative. The three-way paradigm Jones says “almost wrecked Catherine’s life. It also became part of the fuel of the electrifying feeling in the best of her novels.

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The Hurst, a lodging house in Hastings that Catherine bought with her savings

By age 31 Catherine has at last met someone she can spend her life with who will be emotionally supportive and is deeply congenial to her: Tom Cookson, a younger man (he’s 24) and (alas we find) a Protestant. She met him because he lodged with her mother.

Catherine had taken steps to rid herself of her nightmare life with her mother and her lesbian-dominating lover-partner, Nan. First she found another place near her for her mother to live and it was big enough for her mother to have a lodger (Tom), and cheap enough for her mother to afford it by renting bits of it out. (That’s how people used to live, and they are returning to it in the US.)

Then she realized by her hard work of many years as a head laundress she has enough to buy property at Hastings and she does so, The Hurts. Very bold for her. A beautiful older Edwardian house and another and these she fixes and sets up as lodgings. She realizes that she can live without working as a laudress and quits her job! This gives her genuine time to read and to write.

When her mother returns north, she thinks perhaps briefly to see her awful husband die, Catherine will not let her mother come back. I gather then that Catherine is supporting the mother in part.

The one nemesis now is Nan. Tom has gone to live in Catherine’s boarding house and their relationship is growing: the obstacles now also includes letters between Catherine and Nan. Apparently the man was not broad-minded enough to accept a woman who had a sexual relationship with another woman. Here we see how Jones’s saying there is no proof of lesbianism is a feint to please someone as this blackmailing shows that indeed the two women were lovers and there was once or is still proof from letters. Nan is threatening Catherine.

And he is Protestant. A great no no.

Catherine has to throw off the prejudices of this religion and see the great friend is also poisoning her life. This is a very great struggle for her. At each turn, this book teaches the woman reader important lessons. The overriding one is the obstacle deep into the psyche beyond how you are treated by others which birth into a lower class or as a woman leads to. Also how socially gendered sexual norms function harmfully

Catherine and Tom on the day they married, June 1, 1940

Tom Cookson’s life is a parallel story to Catherine’s. Born working class, his father a verger died when he was 3, his mother remarried and his stepfather treated him well. He was highly intelligent but in the environment this isolated him; he was physically short, ugly and emotionally sensitive. Happily for him this was a time when the UK gov’t had put in place ways for such a boy to rise, so he made it to Oxford, was supported there, but because of his accent (cockney) and social snobberies he could not overcome, he got a job only as math teacher at Hastings Grammar School. This was the only post he ever held but he held onto it for a very long time.

I know no one will knock it, it was easier than laundress and then head laundress in a workhouse. And he was not maimed by cruel sexual abuse the way Catherine was.

Once they are living together in her new lodging house, it took quite a time and intense pressure within herself for Catherine to bring herself to marry him. Her friend Nan was an enemy here. While on the one hand, she was proud of her new legitimate identity, the baggage she carried was a terrible destructive force. When they married, she did not have full sexual intercourse with him for a quite a time and then only once; hence, when she got pregnant she could not believe it. . She could not easily go into a shop to buy things; she’s become nauseous with anxiety. She did stay home finally to have her baby (she was not well – super thin — perhaps anorexic) and read away. Alas, her baby was stillborn, it seems she was Rh negative. She blamed herself.

Then we get another load of social cruelties. Astonishing what people do to one another. Why? Because the baby could not be not christened because it was born dead, it was not considered to have existed. She had to place it anonymously with another corpse in another grave.

She is writing, has drawers full of it, but unfortunately except for Tom when she shows anything to anyone they scorn or dismiss it derisively. She can’t spell very well. She begins to draw.

All the while WW2 is approaching and in 1941 Tom is called up for the RAF. Without him she is now lost; he has become all and all to her.

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St Mary’s Psychiatric Hospital where Catherine was admitted after her first major breakdown

The story of Catherine Cookson’s experience of WW2 continues the history of grief and trauma. She had gotten to the point where she panicked if she was parted from Tom for more than a day so she went to live near his base and he lived off-base with her. Basically what happened is with the horrors and trauma of the time, Catherine’s religion, her Roman Catholicism and her desire to have a child tipped the balance so that deep distress from all her years of rejection, hardship and twisted family pathologies made her go to pieces. She kept getting pregnant and since she was RH negative, she kept having miscarriages, and stillborn fetuses — she never got as near term as she did the first time. She then blamed herself as sinful. Her priests were no help: after all she had it coming to her because she married this protestant. Tom even went so far as to offer and begin to convert, but she stopped him (had some sanity) and began to distance herself at long last from this noose around her neck and blindfold around her mind and heart.

She was subjected to electric shock treatments and spent time in a mental hospital. All her hatred of her mother came out; she said she wanted to kill her mother. Jones surmises from the published and unpublished autobiography that Catherine is omitting something — partly Catherine keeps talking of secrets she’s not telling. What could they be? Sexual abuse. Jones says it’s just taboo and verboten to talk of mothers sexually abusing their children, but the few times BBC radio has invited open talk a flood of message are seen where it emerges that women sexually abuse their children, older sisters their younger. Catherine was at first brought up to think her mother was her sister.

The war is finally coming to an end and Catherine and Tom returning to the lodging house she bought. Not all bad as her drawing had begun to become so good that when she took some illustrations she did to be copied to send it to a friend or relative, the commercial person advised her to make copies and sell it. She actually had an art show where her work was exhibited alongside Laura Knight (Dame Laura Knight). Tom was a saint of a husband.

I’d like to say that it seems to me Catherine was also a victim of the medical system of her time and would be of ours today towards the mentally distressed. There was no medicine worth the name and the “professionals’ as well as the priests made her worse.

She couldn’t throw off the conventions and norms around her.

I am puzzled why she knew nothing of Rh negative in the blood for women who become pregnant with a husband who is probably RH positive. I remember learning about this in the 1950; Did no one know of it in the 1940s? Was she in a total backwater? Oops! In the later 1950s I would have been 13 and in the ninth grade where we learned some “biological” science it was called — some sexual topics were included and that meant pregnancy

Catherine with her paintings at an exhibition of northeastern women artists

She is now coming to live in this house and at peace with her husband and beginning to be a recognized artist, she writes poetry (not very good) and it seems she is about to turn her life around by beginning to write and publish fiction. The photos in the book show that Tom was her right hand man and editor.

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Tom late in life

Chapters 13 and 14 take us finally into the time of Catherine’s life when she becomes a successful novelist. It came very hard. First of all she had to dredge, pull, excavate from within herself her terrible experiences and present them in forms that were acceptable: admirably, she never resorted to glossing over, justifying the world that she found, but this made it hard for her to get published. One area that she had to get over was she could not deal with the demand that she write grammatically or as an educated person. She was not. This just got in the way of her producing. It does seem she and Tom had bunches or at least groups of friends and when she would read anything she wrote to some of these people, silence would fall. It seems their attitude was one should not mention, much less write books about such realities. She sent her stories out to publishers and agents galore, and was rejected continually; but finally someone (a friend) did put her into contact with an agent who did like her work. Then what happened is after the success of the first novel, Kate Hannigan, basically the story of her mother, her second which was on herself (Annie) was rejected so soundly that she was devastated. She did go on to write a third, The Fifteen Streets where the protagonist was the world of the streets she grew up on. Along the way she had some harrowing experiences.

For example, she got all dressed up to go to a publisher (of course she’d dress up) and took that train in a mood of dread, anxiety, and when she arrived was told she was there on the wrong day. I’ve heard that one before. Maybe sometimes it is a wrong day or time but often it’s that the person has the gall simply to change their mind. She was fobbed off by the secretary who I suppose had a heart or Catherine insisted. Then the meeting was awful.

This is just one small example of the kind of thing she had to endure. I imagine the writing was so satisfying and since she had not much to do during the day (she didn’t work for money and finally gave up on this business of having children), she carried on.

There were many strains in the marriage during these years, and on top of that she continually would have her mother to stay. Jones suggests again that the mother sexually abused Catherine to try to explain the feelings of sheer hatred Catherine felt. Over the whole course of Catherine’s life her mother drank and is called by Jones an alcoholic. Catherine seems to have hated this drinking, primarily (Jones says) because it brought out the violence, domineering and nasty tongues of her mother. But it’s hard to say; in my experience people often dislike someone who drinks heavily; Jones brings enough to suggest it was much more than that — from notes for her novels for example. Often when her mother did come to stay she would become depressed and unable to write. Cookson also can’t throw over this religion of hers altogether even though she says she no longer believes in its doctrines and there are statement about the pernicious of the Catholic church’s policies.

I do have to say the passages from the novels quoted are not alluring. They do seem crude, with grammar or stylistic errors. They don’t attract. I have not gotten up to the years where she won the Winifred Holtby award for one of her books and where another one was filmed, so perhaps she improved. There is a list of novels at the close of the book which shows Cookson to have written over 100 novels before she died, sometimes 3 a year.

This last section of the biography proper begins with the agonies Catherine went through in writing and rewriting her autobiography. It appears to exist in several versions in manuscripts, and in each different kinds of censorship are afoot.

What appalls me in this chapter is how much pressure her editors at her publishers had over her. They were able to dictate (it seems to me) what she could and did write. She did produce some more light-hearted (that’s what they are called) books swirling around the same heroine and these sold very well indeed.

But it seems to me (Jones does not put it this way) that this listening to these conventional people eager to make loads of money limited many of Cookson’s books. At a couple of points when something didn’t sell or a movie failed, her publisher would stop publishing her books.

She had absolutely no prestige and no respect — that’s the key to this — and she never got any for real from the people publishing her.
She was very sensitive I concluded and for the first 30 or more years of her life hid it and controlled it. When finally she had some compassion and a chance to flower (from marriage to Tom), she went to pieces for a long time and was then the subject of medical establishment horrors. Then finally she broke free, but the fundamental class attitudes never changed, nor gender dismissal of her type of fiction.

In this last chapter she does have the relief of her mother’s death and her reaction afterward (again the guilt trip) is likened to Anne Sexton’s daughter who I now learn wrote a truthful autobiography in which she told how Anne Sexton sexually abused her. This is in line with the character of this woman in her poetry. Linda Grey Sexton has been attacked for telling the truth; she is courageous and I admire it.

For the conclusion: Catherine’s last years and an evaluation of her novels see comments.

Catherine in Allendale where she set many of her novels

Ellen