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 mean, most of the characters in the novel are awful, certainly anyone who has ever lived at WH has been awful at times and generally awful things happen to them including the mild people living at the posh house. I was actually laughing this time around about how awful everything is all the way through. The only romantic thing about is Kate Bush's song!

Great post, OP.

I was really surprised that Rivals by Jilly Cooper maintained the ‘schoolgirl entranced by older playboy’ trope in the recent TV series.

i didn’t see much negativity around that either, which is a shame.

I love The Far Pavilions and had such a crush on Ash - agree it is wonderfully well-written and researched as I think MM Kaye's family members served in the army in India. She did also write the rather more dodgy Trade Wind, where the heroine's cousin (who is possibly also her fiancé) rapes the mistress of the bad-boy sea captain hero, who then rapes the heroine (confusingly called Hero) in revenge.

I love Catherine Cookson! I was also hooked as a teen. I haven't watched as an adult, but now feel I need to.

I suppose we have also come a long way since the 60's. Was she maybe a hopeless, clueless young romantic when she wrote these books!?

I love this thread! Seeing all these books again. But yes the whole themes running through them. Tbh though life has always been mostly shit for woman and girls. Unless you had some money and even then your were vulnerable. Times have changed in some ways!

Obviously not Catherine cookson but did anyone ever read "Gone with the wind"?

I was reading them in primary school in the late 80s and early 90s until a teacher decided they were not appropriate reading material 😅

YABU as she was of her time and I credit her with raising my class consciousness, lol. Feathers in the Fire, freaked me out though😮

Oh yes! I must find my copy and the sequal - not sure i finished that.

@socialdilemmawhattodo the sequel wasn't very good in my mind. But I was only 10yrs old. So my literature critique might not count for much 😆

Loved the Maryann series it was a fairly accurate description of oop north

Used to read a lot of Cookson at my nans, she would get books regularly via something like Britannia book club?
entirely inappropriate reading for a 10 year old but I was a fairly precocious reader so I guess that my nan and mum never considered the content.
she also had a lot of Lena Kennedy - thank you to the poster up thread who mentioned her. I have vague memories of a book based around Bethnal Green in ww2 which had the blitz and the direct hit at the tube station as a major plot point so I’m going to have to re-read to see if I can work out which book it was

Just out of interest has anyone watched the Catherine Cookson Mallen series. Just want confirmation it was as bad as I remember.

My grandmother loved Catherine Cookson as she grew up in that area. I think these things did go on. Poverty for women meant no power. No husband meant starvation or manipulation.
They are a hard watch though.

The Moth was Catherine Cookson I think. Read it as a teenager and was angry at the women s fate.

Carrie Bradley is raped as a teenager gets pregnant and is cast aside by her holier than thou church going father (mother no help either). Eventually dies giving birth and her son is stillborn.

Milly (I think) is a heiress who s very anxious and has possible learning disabilities and is treated outrageously and locked in an asylum by her own family to prevent her inheriting her estate.

Robert is the good guy who tries to help but is blamed by Carrie s father for (wrongly) impregnating Carrie (his cousin I think).

Unrelenting misery but might re read it.

I loved Catherine Cookson and still do.
They were of their times.

All of this! I’m 57, my first encounter with a police officer was when I was about 11 and I asked him if the buses were running, he turned to his fellow officer then back to me and said “are you trying to get off with me?” This was generally thought to be very funny be adults I told at the time 🙄 I could go on…….. horribly they are representative of what women were led to expect from life post WW2. “Marry the first man who makes you laugh and be grateful if he doesn’t hit you” is what women were told in 1950s and 60s according to female relatives

Richard Chamberlain - from the TV adaptation of The Thorn Birds - has apparently just died.
He was almost 91 though so that's a good age to make it to.
🙁

I have finished watching the Black Velvet Gown and by popular demand here is my summary:

Helen from Ozark is a widowed mum of 3 and homeless. Well, for 90 seconds. Then a passing person tells her there’s a job for her in That House Over There (this is a real pattern with Cookson stories I’ve noticed). She totters off and starts to fall for a man who I think is supposed to be sexy but has an alarming mullet and a face like a dropped pie. He shall hereafter be known as Pie Face. As it happens, her master, Muldoon from Jurassic Park, appears to take a shine/borderline obsession to her and her DC. He comes across as kind, generous, loving and is diligently lovely to her and her kids. She starts to fancy him and waits around in bed in the buff for him, but he doesn’t appear.

So wouldn’t it be nice if Helen managed to get a lovely rich kind generous man to be in love with her? But, reader, this is Cookson. It turns out Muldoon is a massive nonce. Which explains why he didn’t join her in bed. This is Discovered when he gets WAY too handsy with her son after a spectacularly melodramatic tantrum over a pony. The son pummels him with a hook and badly injures him. Turns out he was a teacher and left due to the temptation of abusing children! Helen is furious of course and even more so when the Muldoon tells her if she leaves the house he will tell the justices about her son attacking him and the son will go to prison. So she accepts her fate to be forced to stay as his housekeeper. Pie Face confesses his love but when she’s all “Look Pie, I love you too but I’m being held prisoner here so that my 10yo boy stays out of jail”. Pie Face loses his shit and screams about how horny he is. She tells him to fuck right off.

8 years later - Muldoon croaks. Hurrah! Even though he leaves everything to Helen in his will he leaves no cash and she’s can’t sell anything. Oh and she can’t get married either as she’ll lose the house and it will defer to her DD, Lily Potter (Harry’s mum), now an adult. Lily has to go to work in service where she’s is beaten savagely by the adult children in the house and another adult child falls in love with her. His sister wants to marry him, which is weird and v brief spanner in the works, but the sister dies in childbirth delivering a bastard.

Meanwhile Pie Face’s mullet gets bigger and greyer. Him and Helen kiss and make up and get married

Lilly and her posh man - now disinherited - take the bastard orphan to live in Muldoon’s house now it’s hers, and they get married despite the fact he’s mildly horrified that she thinks girls should go to school.

Next up: Fifteen Streets

Thank you for your service @JandamiHash . After reading that I'm going to bleach my brain. Suggest you put yours on for a boil wash, your poor eyes.

Oh god I watched the Dwelling Place recently too. Whatever happened to that hot actor who murdered his wife but it was OK because she nagged him from her sick bed? No idea why Finchy from The Office found it all so funny.

I have them on 'series link' to watch when DP is out. They're ghastly, but so watchable! All those young actors from other things, twatting about factories and drawing rooms. And nasty old women (probably aged 38) looking down on flighty girls.

The Gambler has Robson Green in it, surely the pinnacle. I think they suffer though from being cut into a 'film' from a series. Some weird gaps and leaps in the storytelling.

Thank you for your service! Now do the Cinder Path

Just seen, flowers in the attic origin story coming up on channel 5!

"a man who I think is supposed to be sexy but has an alarming mullet and a face like a dropped pie."

I can't stop Chortling at this.