To wonder WTF is wrong with Catherine Cookson

[JandamiHash]

I used to love Catherine Cookson adaptations when I was a teenager. LOVED them. Had loads of box sets and books. I recently discovered them on U and i’ve been watching a few and OMG they’re either all hysterically ridiculous, depressing or brutally violent. Or full of pedophiles

In The Girl the male love interest tells the female lead that she’s been “teasing him with that look ever since you first entered my yard”. Referring to when she was 10 and he was an adult! After losing several body parts in his pursuit for her love, the male love interest and the now grown up “tease” get together after her husband conveniently dies of cholera.

The Glass Virgin has a frizzy haired Emily Mortimer simpering around the North East, opting to be a peasant because she heard a second hand rumour that she isn’t part of her aristocratic family any more. She falls in love with a younger (and not terrible looking) Mr Bates from Downton Abbey, who has a (terrible) Irish accent but is called Manuel Mendoza?! Despite not being Spanish. Cue Emily Mortimer spending about an hour in total running through fields with a lamp shouting “Manuel! Manuel”. BTW Manuel first met her when she was 9 or 10, as her riding instructor, and she falls in love with him because he basically groomed her.

Tonight I’ve been utterly traumatised by the Dwelling Place - where a 16yo orphan, who lives in a cave with her siblings, is brutally raped in front of her little brother, is impregnated by her rapist, and then a couple of years later falls in love with him!! All whilst being perused by a bloke who was all “Im sexy and I love you, but I’m off to marry Hayley Cropper because her dad runs a mill and I’ll be in charge if I marry her, even though I hate her. I’ll pop in now and again to stroke your hand and sniff your hair”.

WTF is wrong with Catherine Cookson?! And also - what was wrong with teenage me that I found these romantic?

Yes I know these books are old as dirt but still, most were written in the 60’s, and I don’t think that even then it was acceptable to fall in love with your rapist or be attracted to 10yo girls.

I want to watch more but I think they’re too insane and unhinged for my liking.

Don’t watch the Mallen ones then. They were actually sickening in parts and as for the acting- bloody awful.

I must admit they are easy watching. The wingless bird is good as it’s more modern

Used to read these on holiday when I ran out of books!

It’s the only one I can think of that does not involve rape or lots of violence. Yeps it’s partly set during the war but you don’t get to see much of the fighting.

Ah Catherine Cookson - queen of the "it's grim up north" novels.
If I remember correctly Catherine Cookson had a complicated life being bought up with believing her grandparents were her parents and her mother was her sister which I suppose when she found out had quite an impact on her.
I never really got into her books but used to read a lot of those saga type books and they are a bit "urgh" looking back at them.

Is the Wingless Bird the one where Sue from Outnumbered marries someone and then he died and she falls in love with his brother? I quite like that one and there wasn’t much violence IIRC

I liked them, they mirrored the stories told to me vy my grandmother and friends (all born around 1910 and earlier). Look at the attitude of the police towards the groomed girls, now imagine how bad things were decades before that, when we legally took babies off unmarried mothers and locked them away for life. Girls were blamed for pedophiles abusing them. The book Lolita was classified as romantic fiction. SWs of the time blamed girls for enticing men. Men were told that they were entitled to sex. Read the threads from women my age, 57, there was a lot of sexual assaults. We were fair game as soon as we had slightly developed. In my case I was around 11, men being sexually inappropriate towards us, were laughed off by the adults around us.

I used to wonder the same about Virginia Andrews, all her books were about incest, getting pregnant and being locked up

I loved Catherine Cookson until I read one where she falls in love with her rapist who got her pregnant, which apparently is fine because it was the rapist’s sister who forced hi.pm to do it. Is that the Dwelling Place?

Just checked. It is. It was appalling, and I’d really enjoyed them up until then.

My mum loved CC books and films, I tried read a CC book but couldn't. I remember I watched a drama on tv and it made me feel sick.

I also remember that I enjoyed but was shocked as a young girl, by the mini series of Barbara Taylor Bradford (called 'a woman of substance') and both my mum and nan said it was different years ago.
I suppose it was a product of the attitudes of its time then?
Still very dodgy all the same.

Yes that’s the Dwelling Place! And he buys her a house so it’s all squared away 🙄 and she tells him not to blame himself!

I loved watching 'A Woman of Substance'. I seem to remember her being a very strong character which impressed me.

I sometimes watch them on tv, but they don't particularly interest me. My DP, OTOH, loves them!

In her books she was continually rewriting her own version of her origin story iirc. Raised by grandparents, discovering her sister was her mother in early childhood, constructing a narrative of her absent father being a mysterious rich devilish handsome cad rather than a workaday chancer with a gambling problem. There's always a poor virtuous woman left holding the baby after the lord of the manor takes advantage of her but hey, happy ending, because after various degradations they wind up together. All depicted in lurid fantasy terms, as a young girl with a need for a strong imaginary world might do.

The book Lolita was classified as romantic fiction.

It really, really wasn't.

Yes that’s the one

I can remember reading the Tilly Trotter books when I was young and being horrified. My mum had all of her books.

You need to read The Maltese Angel and Feathers in the Fire. Cookson had quite a mind.

This.

I used to read my mum’s Mills and Boon and many of them were just as dodgy. Women being raped and ‘enjoying’ it, or coerced into marriage and falling in love with their abuser were just two of the themes. Absolutely dreadful.

YANBU. I often think these books reveal a lot about the author. I haven’t read Mary Wesley’s Camomile Lawn but the film is insane. Multiple women of different ages having a relationship with the same old man, a ménage a trois - so unhealthy and screwed up. Makes you wonder what went on in Wesley’s own childhood.

I loathe Cookson. My idiot DM used to watch them on TV when we were kids. I could really have done without being exposed to TV rape scenes as a young girl. Cheers for that, Mum.

My Nan used to LOVE Catherine Cookson. Just hearing the name makes me instantly remember our walks to the library together.

I remember reading quite a few when I was a young teen and thinking they were ok, but never really falling in love with them. I think I mainly read them to bond with my nan.

I don’t think these kind of themes are unique to CC though. Particularly the plot where an adult man meets the female when she’s a young teen/a child and has “always loved her”, waiting patiently for her to reach adulthood.

Obviously we know now that those plots are grim, and they’d never fly in today’s world. But I think back then they were viewed as some kind of proof of soulmates or a love that was meant to be….the ultimate in romance. Hard to believe now, but it really was commonplace and no one really ever viewed it as grooming/paedophilia.

My DM was describing a book to me a couple of days ago. Not CC but that genre, albeit more modern, written fairly recently. The plot was something about an autistic young woman who’s mistreated by her family, goes to stay with a trusted male relative/step-relative/family friend (DM wasn’t clear on this point). The autistic woman is “younger than her years” and isnt wise to the world. Eventually they end up sleeping together and he “makes her his woman” - that phrase 🤢 Anyway, I pointed out to DM that it sounded as if the vulnerable young woman was being exploited and groomed - DM insisted that she wasn’t because “she wanted it” and the man was reluctant at first because he didn’t want to hurt her.

As an autistic woman myself, with autistic DC, I honestly can’t put into words how offensive and inappropriate all of that sounds. So while literature might have gotten better in some ways, we’ve still got a long way to go!

Catherine Cookson grew up in the ‘good old days’ when women often had to rely on men, and often married (or became a mistress) in order to be fed, housed and clothed, and perhaps beaten.

Her books, many of which I read in the 1960s (and have since forgotten) were as PP have said, a product of her own life experience.

i never read them but occasionally i catch them on tv in the afternoon, just to watch actors who i know now as t hey were then!
grim up north indeed.

I used to love Catherine Cookson books. They are from another era and a lot of what went on in the books did go on I think. Women have always justified all sorts of things to themselves to reframe their trauma in a way, that makes life bearable.

A man waiting til a girl reaches 16 or 18 wasn’t really seen as a big deal and could be the path of true love. It was totally normal for a lot of us to date outside our age group when I was young. I’m talking fully grown men well into their 20s and beyond at 15/16. A girl I went to school with married a man, who was mid 30s when she was pregnant by him at 16. I remember sagely agreeing with my friends that anyone over 30 was too old. Wtf!

Reframing life experiences still goes on today just to a lesser degree. Take the woman or girl, who gets caught out by a guy, who pretends to really care for her, wants a relationship, playing the long game, then has sex with her and does the big discard. She may very well justify to herself that she enjoyed the sex but the sex was obtained by false pretences. Had she known what would happen afterwards, would she have consented?

Oh this takes me back. I was a voracious reader as a child so read anything that was around and my mum always had CC books from the library.
Makes you realise how much things have changed in such a short time. All the messaging from books and TV about relationships and gender roles and race. My mum used to read those Kyle Onstott Falconhurst books about plantation life where some bodiced young daughter of the owner would fall for a strapping slave.
Then all the Mills and Boon and Barbara Cartland novels with the same ultimate theme of women being rescued by men. ‘I HATE him. No hang on I LOVE him’.
I suppose Jane Austen did it too!