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.

I read the books in my teens in the 80s. I can honestly say I never gave a thought to the issues with them that are so glaring through today's lens. As PP said, attitudes towards women were different then, with teens treated as adult women by men as soon as they hit puberty. There was still a hang over of the 'nice girls say no' attitude (in my world anyway) so the rapes meant the book could still have the obligatory sex scenes, and women could have the pregnancies that drove every plot, without losing the sympathy of their audience for being 'cheap'. I don't know if I excuse Cookson for reflecting contemporary attitudes in her writing, or blame her for perpetuating them, but having lived in an era of different attitudes, I'm leaning to the first.

No - the point is just that many women read and like it - just as many read and liked CC. My Gran read CC - but never described it as romantic.

It's interesting isn't it. I grew up with my mum obsessed with Mills and Boon. She grew up without a father and I wonder, reading this, if that had something to do with it. My Dad is wonderful: kind, handsome, adores her - but it's like there was always something missing. There was also some grooming and SA by family members as a young child (under 11).

My sister and I never read any of Mum's romance novels - first we weren't allowed (you'd think that would make us want to rebel!). Then later, we used to read portions out loud and fall over laughing because of course we read 'proper literature' and that was all so badly written.

I've never really thought before went my mum loved those kind of fantasy books. She is well educated, did English literature to A level and an essay based degree, has an incredible vocabulary. But that was literally ALL she read (interestingly, she couldn't tolerate Cookson). Perhaps it was to do with having no father and then 2 dodgy paedophilic uncles. So glad that for the past 60 years of her life she's had my very lovely Dad.

I think people are being naive that this was so long ago - it's not, it's many womens' present lives, maybe not yours, but women in other countries certainly.

Life is and has often been awful for women with very few choices and most of them bad - it certainly was for my female relatives in the generation above me who lived not so far away from here and were forced to marry their 'boyfriends' or have their children taken and live life in a Magdelene laundry. Your 'boyfriend' was any man that you had had sex with, with no interest in whether any sort of consent was involved.

If you live that life, it might be comforting to engage in fantasies about other women in similiar circumstances having happy endings.

Books help us to understand lives other than our own - CC should help us understand that women's rights are very very fragile and that we should never be willing to give them away because when they are gone, this is the sort of life our daughters and grandaughters will end up with.

My mum used to love Catherine Cookson - all she ever read.

I love Jilly Cooper but I recently reread Emily - and that's awful and that was written in 1975 so way after Catherine Cookson.

I haven't watched or read any all the way through but Emily Mortimer was strikingly pretty! I remember her bounding around some sunlit landscape, looking faintly worried, and being dark-haired and sharp-featured (green or greenish eyes?) rather than a standard television 'babe'.

@JandamiHash can I second the suggestion that you should be required to watch the rest of them and continue to provide plot summaries please?

When people ask "But why do women stay with these horrible men?" I think 20th* century romantic literature has got a lot to answer for. It's full of shocking normalisations of awful male behaviour. Signed, an autistic woman who got most of her early knowledge of what to expect in romantic relationships from Virginia Andrews and Jilly Cooper 😬.

*And 19th century too of course- hellooo Heathcliffe!

It's so hard to think back and accurately remember your thought process when you first read that sort of thing. I've only read some of the Mallens but I don't remember being shocked. I think part of it you justify as a different world - this wasn't going to be my life and I understood that. But I always knew that about all romantic film/TV. It's not real and I think today we sometimes get too caught up thinking it's claiming to be. Although who knows what effect all those narratives have on us combined. Books have definitely affected me.

Interesting too what people are saying above about Cookson's own experience and women reframing their trauma. We do all want to make our happy ending.

I've just had to give up on By Any Other Name by Jodi Picoult (published 2024) for the same reason. Except the girl in it is aged 12 🤢.

Security and resources is why. If you have no shoes or coat, your clothes are rags and you are about to faint from starvation and the cold, you are not going to worry what is done to your body below the neck if all that can be reversed.

I see to recall that one is set in Tudor times and girls were considered marriageable at 13 then - but still yuck.

I did my dissertation on the exact same thing in the late 90s!

Sorry, my original post wasn't clear! My point was that women on Mumsnet always get a really hard time for staying with awful men, when one of the reasons is that their expectations of a relationship have been warped by early exposure to romantic literature that normalises all kinds of abusive situations.

And that, especially as an autistic teenager whose entire world was books and whose own parents were not modelling an equitable, respectful relationship, these expectations warped my romantic life for decades.

Those novels usually have the same sort of cover - poor but attractive girl, grim looking background, on the cover. I used to work in a library, and a colleague used to refer to them as ‘She had to take in washing’ books. 😂

I've tried re reading these in my 50s, fuck me, its hard work. I've not got out of the first few chapters....

Yes!

I used to read on the train to work every day, so I bought loads of books, usually what was being promoted, inc Jilly Cooper, but having it pop up again on Audio books I re read and its sooooo Cringe. A lot of books from that period are, looking back on it. As are TV programmes from that time. Remember all the fanfare they used to introduce a drama with a strong female lead? Or the fan fare Angela Rippon as the first woman news reader...and the fact that there must be a "rivalry" with Anna Ford or Joan Bakewell being called "The Thinking Man's Crumpet." that's really not that long ago.. It's all on a par with having naked women as part of your daily newspaper.
Thank god the world has moved on since then, though there's still some way to go I think.

I used to enjoy the adaptations on tv as a teenager too. I saw The Dwelling Place again more recently and was horrified! Awful storyline.
There were a few others that were quite disturbing too from what I remember.

My Nan and Grandad loved them when I was younger. They used to watch the TV adaptations as well, but I found them really disturbing. They are definitely not light and fluffy!

Blimey, I remember reading The Dwelling Place (when I was far too young), and can picture various scenes in the adaptation <shudder>.

The Cinder Path, was that another one?

I hated her books in the 60s but didn't know why.... A lot of the stuff that was deemed acceptable in the 60s to the 90s in retrospect are appalling from today's perspective. But I am astonished that the incredibly badly written 50 shades series is so mainstream and accepted.

The shopping and fucking novels of the 90s still exist to some extent in the novels of Candace Bushnell and Lauren Weisberger, but they have a satirical edge that the 90s novels didn’t have.

I watched the TV adaptation of The Glass Virgin, and loved it at the time! Had quite a crush on Manuel! I subsequently bought and enjoyed the book.

Haven't looked at it in decades. Maybe I should reread it.

Loads of books, both good and bad, read very differently as a teen vs grownup though.

Haha the next one U is recommending is I think the black velvet gown. I’ll give it a crack.

So many good points on this thread. I can’t believe my memories are of lighthearted romance.

Most of them were written by a ghost writer, Andrew Neidermann.
Virginia Andrews died before flowers in the attic series was finished and he wrote the prequel, about the grandmother.

His books are very formulaic 😂