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.

Or the Decameron for that matter

My Mum and her friends loved CC , they still do 🙄much as l loved reading l never liked her books . They were so dour and bleak.

I don’t want to inconvenience you @JandamiHashbut I’d like you to watch the whole lot as I’ve enjoyed your synopsis so much.

I never liked them because of the downtrodden nature of the stores. I preferred Jackie Collins. Lucky Santangelo in a sports car building hotels in Las Vegas. I bet if I reread them now I’d feel the same.

I think they often featured a young, impoverished woman's success against the odds, so they're quite appealing in that sense.

Did you read Fifty Shades as a teenager and think it was a romantic story full of love and then reread it when you were older and these memories were completely altered and you now confused as to how you ever thought it was a romance novel and you want to discuss that?

I like The Fifteen Streets with Sean Bean. It’s got a young Jayne Horrocks in, and lots of other famous faces.
Her books are old fashioned now, but a lot of these things went on in times gone by. Helen Forrester’s book mentions boys/men abusing the dead body of a young female at a funeral directors, and her book is actually about her life in the 20/30/40’s.

My mother hated Catherine Cookson and (presumably having read at least one) refused to bring any into the house.

I hate them as they're total misery. I like to be entertained not depressed by my books.

The entire point of Lolita is the unreliable narrator and the portrayal of not just ‘male gaze’ but actual evil.
I understand why people can’t stomach it - there are lots of ’great’ films that contain too much violence or horror for me to watch, but I wouldn’t dismiss them on those grounds.

That sounds less the fault of Catherine Cookson and more the fault of your mother's background and limitations.

Welcome to adulthood. 'Rescue me, you great brute, I hate you/I love you'. Is the theme of the larger part of 'womens' fiction. Takes a while to notice.

The early ones definitely are. Rape all over the place. Interesting fact, Philippa Carr and Jean Plaidy were the same person. As was Victoria Holt, I devoured her books as a teen too but a lot were dodgy. They were all pseudonyms of Eleanor Hibbert, one of the most prolific romance authors ever.

I don't think Catherine Cookson and the similar authors are always categorised as "romance" novels though. They are usually referred to as "historical saga".
Humans seem to love reading about misery.

@KimberleyClark I used to read Jean Plaidy in my early teens (early 70s). When my mother asked what I was reading I used to say "oh about the Plantagenets/Tudors".

In the 70s, there was a literary vacuum for teenagers/young adults or if there wasn't I didn't find what should have been in it. I was a voracious reader as a child and then faced rather barren shelves. Struggling a bit with the Brontes and Dickens and finding what we read in the early years of secondary school so dire, I can't remember what we read.

However, books are of their time. I adored the C S Lewis Narnia books as a child and bought the set for my own children. They found them very difficult to engage with and when I reread them found them very dated, and on a level I missed as a child, very complex.

I used to read CC when I was younger but went off them when I realised how formulaic they were. Basically 90% of the story involves one horrific episode of tragedy/ trauma after another, usually death of provider, sibling, sexual abuse, horrific industrial/ agricultural accident or act of god just as plucky young resourceful woman is getting on her feet, then more of the same until in the last 5 pages there’s some kind of semi-happy outcome. I can’t face wading through the trauma now!

I would say that whilst I agree that a lot of the themes don’t stand up to modern mindsets, I suspect that some of the less far fetched storylines were exactly what happened in the periods she was writing about (marrying abuser to stay out of the workhouse, lower class women being seen as a commodity), so at least her becoming popular might have exposed all of this to some light. And she did always put women, and lower class women, at the centre of the story which was still quite unusual.

The 15 streets traumatised me as a kid with the drowning scene. Have to say I do love a bit of Catherine Cookson dor sheer cheese but perhaps that's the northern in me.

And Mary Wesley's 'Hebe' where the mother is a sex worker ( but its all very pleasantly portrayed of course). She uses the money to put her son through private school.

"i’ve been watching a few and OMG they’re either all hysterically ridiculous, depressing or brutally violent. Or full of pedophiles"

As were the lives of women at the time of Cookson writing these books, and the era in which she set them. It's the old adage - 'write what you know'. And as has already been pointed out, pretending to yourself that you love your rapist and he only raped you because he loved you so much was no more than a coping strategy for women in an era where to be 'fallen' woman was bloody dangerous and could end in working in a brothel just to eat and dying in childbirth. Always the woman's own fault! So yes, marrying your rapist at least offered the promise of having only one rapist rather than hundreds.

I've never read her books (more of a sci-fi fan) but a quick look at her Wikipaedia page gives enough info to see where she was coming from. Rather than wonder WTF is wrong with Catherine Cookson, maybe wonder WTF is wrong with the world she grew up in and wrote about.

There are still states in America in 2025 where , if a rape victim agrees to marry her rapist, there are no criminal charges .

I still enjoy the Narnia books,but didn’t really like the film versions at all, especially PrinceCaspian, where there was a romance between Caspian and Susan that absolutely was not there in the books!

I'm old and agree with this.

I've only read The Mallens but it is totally what would have happened.

I was born and grew up in a small village in the home counties that I could not afford to live in now. It's millionaires row.

I was aware of wife swapping, children being raised alongside their 'sibling' that was actually their mother, incest, severe bullying, a wife being bought from her parents in Thailand (1959) and never being allowed to leave the house except to be ambulanced away due to collapse from being so severely fisted. Child pregnancies. Children being raised in abject poverty to the point the pee in their mattress would freeze while their parents were gambling in the back of the local pub so ...also illegal card school. Thieving, drug taking, illegal abortion and child murder, property theft, suicide and mental health breakdowns. At least three people I knew growing up were living in their sheds rather than live with their spouse (one of those being my own grandfather), questionable disappearances that would never be investigated, truancy never investigated, physical and mental abuse, arson, cutting, drug dealing, fraud.

I could go on so all of this and more taking place in the 1800's in rural England is highly likely and probably compulsory.

Children were just a by product of a marriage and often an unwanted one especially once the GIs arrived.

CC showed massive restraint in my view.

I agree OP, I watched the dwelling place a few months ago and I was flabbergasted and seriously annoyed when she fell in love with her rapist. Disgusting and so demeaning to women.

Sadly it is still the theme of a lot of the lives of real women with limited options. My friend works in a family centre in a very deprived area. The young women she works with go from toxic relationship to toxic relationship. They find themselves in a relationship with a man who they know will beat them , because he's already been with their friend, beaten her and their children senseless, and has now moved on to someone new. They live in hope that it will be better for them. It isn't. They remain within their small locality because they don't see any other option " It's not for us". There are no romantic endings there just the passing of the misery onto the next generation

Both can be bad at the same time. Agree 50 shades was awful.

And you have to bear in mind that until 1875 the age of consent was 12 , going up to 13 ten years later.

Also many people even today work in prostitution to feed and educate their kids

These books are of the time they were set, not current standards. Doesn't mean there's anything wrong with the author