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“... both conditions. ‘The men all so good for nothing and hardly any women at all’ was the core of Catherine Morland’s distaste for history in Northanger Abbey. Historical fiction does something to redress the gender bias, but little to improve the moral quality of the male personalities. It wouldn’t make for a good story if it did. But those wanting to ...”

“... and Matthew Kneale slipped to seventh place, behind Anita Shreve, Jack Higgins, Paul Eddy and Catherine Cookson, without sales falling off too dramatically, as a respectable 1366 units of English Passengers left the shelves. Perhaps in future paperbacks should think twice before proclaiming themselves ‘The No.1 Bestseller’: ‘Second only to ...”

“... of the poor and unknown intersect with the life stories of the rich and famous, Rose strikes gold. Catherine McMullen was the daughter of a washerwoman who had been in the workhouse. A chance reference in a popular romance led her to make her first visit to a public library in order to see for herself what the book referred to was like. Improbably, she was ...”

“... and women readers both, the attraction of women’s life stories, whether the subject is Catherine Cookson or Marianne Faithfull, Margaret Thatcher or Sylvia Plath, is possibility. As Phyllis Rose rightly states, the urgent question in telling – or reading – women’s lives, is: ‘How fully could a woman live?’ Asking the question is ...”

“... stop off in the Lane en route for Garrick Street, or Paddington. To the novice bookman with only a Catherine Cookson and a Roland Barthes between him and the workhouse this was indeed a stirring image of literary success. Gissing would have loved it. Now and then, of course, one pondered the doubtful morality of these Friday expeditions. After all, these ...”

“... a child, Sinéad preferred her own company, and the company-not-company of books: Maeve Binchy, Catherine Cookson, Oscar Wilde and more daring authors, such as Edna O’Brien, who were on her father’s ‘forbidden list’. She lost her taste for reading as an adult because she ‘couldn’t concentrate on other people’s stories’, but she ...”

“... suicide attempts and kitchen renovation. I wonder if the whole saga isn’t cribbed from a Catherine Cookson novel, but, of course, it’s just the regular family narrative. ‘What kind of novels do you write?’ she wants to know. I don’t know the answer to this question, though once, in the States, when I answered ‘fictional’, my ...”

“... environment’ (£5000)? Or a work ‘which reflects the essential qualities of the work of Catherine Cookson’ (£10,000)? Or even ‘a distinguished contribution to folklore studies’ (£50 and an engraved goblet)? Could one book (give or take a few adjustments) win all four of these awards? Perhaps, perhaps. If it did, the author would surely ...”

“... criticism, however, have traditionally needed to distinguish themselves from those who read Catherine Cookson on the train, even if the emergence of cultural studies means that the two spheres now increasingly interlock. Literary scholarship used to be one way of drawing the line, as was the critic’s claim to be endowed with a more than usually ...”

“... of being looked at’. Another that the portrait might pass muster as the cover of a Catherine Cookson novel: an opinion I find thought-provoking, as Cookson’s simple tales of poor women extricating themselves from adverse circumstances were for twenty years, according to the Public Lending Right ...”

“... but the suggestion is always in the wings that better experiences with women (Symonds’s wife Catherine was frigid) might have diverted him into heterosexuality (Symonds represents himself as a homosexual who is prepared to accept indefinite postponement of consummation, but as a husband whose need for ‘sexual outlet’ leads to unwanted pregnancy ...”