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.

Doesn't the Thorn Birds effectively have this too, except that it's a young man with a learning disability and a much older woman? Or have I imagined that?

Love Susan Howatch, especially her St. Benets trilogy. Beautifully drawn characters with very real conflicts. Haven't read MM Kaye yet. I have heard the Far pavilions is worth reading though so will put it on my book bucket list.

I think my mum absorbed the stories from CC, along with the Shell Seekers and the Thorn Birds and others mentioned. From my mum's comfortable 1980s lifestyle, when she heard about my MIL's childhood and teens, her view was MIL probably 'asked for it' or should have shown greater resilience just like the characters in these books.

I knew my Grandmother as a broken, jaded older woman she died in her 50s. It has been interesting picking apart my mums recent comments about events and time. My mum's dislike of her MIL leads her to say the most amazing things. I think she truly believes that MIL should have stayed with the man who knocked her up at 15, married her late and knocked her around.
My mother characterised this as 'she lead him on' he did marry her and he was pleasant to my mum when she met him'

I read the Cazelets recently, that series of books stands up well.

I have a really vivid memory of the whipping scene in The Girl, bloody awful. Didn’t someone get mangled in a bear trap too?

Tilly Trotter ends up in America and her family is wiped out by the local indigenous people from memory, I think it turned her hair white.
There are 3 books and I think it might be book 2

i loved Jilly Cooper in my teens as well as James Herbert i just remembered

Interesting thread. I loved Wuthering Heights when I read it in the 70’s but then realised that it romanticised DV.
I always thought that Mr D’Arcy was a miserable sod and don’t get me started on Mr Rochester…..
I really like that we question these depictions of relationships.

I still think you're blaming CC a bit too much!
Your mum had some sexist attitudes, yes, but they probably came from her upbringing and not from reading fiction.

I listened to WH recently and I don't think it romanticises DV at all. Do you mean by Heathcliff? Heathcliff came across as an anti-hero to me, not somebody to be admired.

"I always thought that Mr D’Arcy was a miserable sod"

Shy people often appear so until you get to know them.

You may be thinking of Tim, by Colleen McCullough, where a lonely older/middle-aged (don't remember her age) woman rescues a developmentally disabled/delayed/whatever it's called building worker from his workmates' bullying when she's having work done on her property, then goes on to marry him. I'm pretty sure he was over 18, though.
Mel Gibson played Tim in the adaptation, I think.

Could well be that, thanks, Brigid

@EuclidianGeometryFan it's funny, I was earlier today on a thread in What We're Reading talking about young adult books we read as teens, and I remembered a book by Robert Westall which was semi autobiography, (Falling Into Glory) about his growing up in 1940s Northumberland, and he does end up having an affair with his schoolteacher. I can't off the top of my head think of another one with the same scenario but I expect there have been some written. We know from reading the newspapers that female teachers do groom and rape their teenage male students.

@GuineaHyggaeReturnsWheekingthe far pavilions is the best book I've ever read, the research that went into it is immense. And it's a right page turner too. I would suggest you start it straight away!

@socialdilemmawhattodo, l loved To Serve Them All My Days, both the book and the tv serial. I atill reread my ancient copy every so often. I read CC when my children were small in the nineties, as they were easy to read. She could tell a story - she was still very prolifically writing during the eighties - whichwas thei secret of her success; an adult version of Enid Blyton in a way. Sagas were very popular in the eighties and nineties. My grandmother was also a prolific reader and loved sagas, especially CC. Towards the end of her life she could not get to the library, so I bought her lots of CC from charity shops and, later, E.V. Thompson. It had never crossed my mind until I read this thread that there were such disturbing undercurrents in Catherine Cookson's books. I haven't read any for years and have no interest in ever reading them again. They were very much of their time and that time has passed. For many years, CC was the most borrowed author in British libraries. I would be very surprised if any of her books were even on the shelves now.

I don't think CC is that far out from todays romance novels, in all honestly, though better written than most. If you pop on down to your library and check out the pulpy romances, the theme of some kind of vaguely (or not so vaguely) coerced sexual encounter with a dislikable but very handsome rogue, followed by the couple falling in love, is really common. Usually the man is somehow changed by her virtue or other good qualities in some way.

Even Outlander follows a similar trope, though more dressed up to be respectable.There seems to be something about that storyline quite a lot of women find very compelling.

The age thing - tbh I think this is almost entirely a cultural change, where marriage now involves very different practical concerns than it did in much of the past. Where marriage is practical, and not about being buddies, and when people traveled less, there really wasn't much reason to insist on them being within a few years in terms of age.

@Violinist64 several Catherine Cookson books have been reprinted in recent years. They are still around.
I think a different author wrote some sequels (I might be wrong and thinking of someone else entirely though).
Edit : I just checked. The author Rosie Goodwin has written 3 sequels to CC books - although they were published almost 20 years ago so not as new as I thought.

I remember my granny’s home help (we were in the North East) breezily informing me that she was the result of the lord of the Manor taking what he wanted from her mother, a housemaid. I was agape!
Granny loved her Catherine Cookson (it’s always ‘Coooksn’ in my head), but my parents had both made it to grammar school & considered her far too low-brow! It was Thomas Hardy & the Brontes for Mum, and Dad looked down on those 😆

I never read The Thornbirds but I have to put in a plug for Colleen Mccollough’s incredible historical series Masters of Rome, a superb retelling of the history of Rome through the lives of its leaders from Marius and Sulla to Augustus. It is an absolute tour de force of historical reconstruction.

There are plenty of her books available on Kindle.

At Waterstones too with fancy new covers.

Apart from being dead?

She wrote according to society of her time.

I'm actually looking at the spine of my copy as we speak, from my desk, and contemplating a reread. It is utterly brilliant, but it peaks at the suttee scene (I say no more for fear of spoilers) and the second part is far less interesting, much more standard Boys' Own adventure stuff.

I think I read it first when I can't have been more than ten or so. and what stayed with me more than anything was Shushila having been trained to bear pain as a child by being forced to stir boiling rice with her little finger, which was then deformed and which she kept hidden in a fold of her sari. (I was a morbid child...)

Ha I actually came on here to say the dwelling place. My mum loved Catherine Cookson and I remember watching it when I was about 12 and thinking then that it was mental. Like he rapes her but he’s all forgiven and it’s all the sisters fault!

It certainly doesn't romanticise violence -- look at the cautionary tale of poor, stupid Isabella Linton, who takes a fancy to Heathcliff, whom she thinks is some kind of rough diamond, despite the warning from Cathy that he's a 'fierce, pitiless, wolfish man', and elopes with him (ignoring the fairly major red flag that he stops to hang her spaniel as they are literally on their way out the gate), only to return a cowed battered wife who runs away, covered in cuts and bruises and in only the clothes on her back, while pregnant.