Catherine Cookson Movie
Latrina Mosely
When the book arrived, I started to read it, and quickly saw here was a third powerful biographical work of art about a woman whom everything around her conspired to turn into that proverbial rose who blushes unseen in the desert air, who withers and dies, about whom, whether distraught or not, no one cares, but who against all odds wrote her heart and intelligence out, fulfilled her gifts in visual art, and left a large body of valuable fiction and non-fiction (over 100 books). Cookson died an enormously rich, somewhat respected historical novelist, much beloved by women readers. She had had eventually the kindest of loving husbands but before that a grim grueling punitive life such that she never was able to free herself of depression, nervous anxiety and a need to reach other people as a form of compensation and release to herself and for others.
What makes people so cruel to one another? I ask myself can the powers that are turning the US and UK (and Germany and France and other places) back take us back to this? I know these cruelties are found in US prisons (terrible sexual abuse for women in prisons nowadays). I know the military endorses vicious values today. I meant to see the Danish film, In A Better World as it were to endorse its critical exposure of bullying but it was on at such a bad time for me during the day and now is gone from the theaters altogether.
Again Catherine confronted the cruelties and counter cruelties of the work house system. She did make a loving friend, a woman who was probably a lesbian and it seems that there is no evidence that is clear that Catherine and Nan Smith were lovers says Jones. At the same time Jones says they slept together. I think she is being discreet in order not to offend still living relatives and the estate. The friendship with Nan was good for her, but not what resulted: Nan followed conventional norms otherwise (outside her sexual orientation), and the mother, Kate, was in trouble.
Then she realized by her hard work of many years as a head laundress she has enough to buy property at Hastings and she does so, The Hurts. Very bold for her. A beautiful older Edwardian house and another and these she fixes and sets up as lodgings. She realizes that she can live without working as a laudress and quits her job! This gives her genuine time to read and to write.
Catherine has to throw off the prejudices of this religion and see the great friend is also poisoning her life. This is a very great struggle for her. At each turn, this book teaches the woman reader important lessons. The overriding one is the obstacle deep into the psyche beyond how you are treated by others which birth into a lower class or as a woman leads to. Also how socially gendered sexual norms function harmfully
Then we get another load of social cruelties. Astonishing what people do to one another. Why? Because the baby could not be not christened because it was born dead, it was not considered to have existed. She had to place it anonymously with another corpse in another grave.
The war is finally coming to an end and Catherine and Tom returning to the lodging house she bought. Not all bad as her drawing had begun to become so good that when she took some illustrations she did to be copied to send it to a friend or relative, the commercial person advised her to make copies and sell it. She actually had an art show where her work was exhibited alongside Laura Knight (Dame Laura Knight). Tom was a saint of a husband.
She is now coming to live in this house and at peace with her husband and beginning to be a recognized artist, she writes poetry (not very good) and it seems she is about to turn her life around by beginning to write and publish fiction. The photos in the book show that Tom was her right hand man and editor.
This last section of the biography proper begins with the agonies Catherine went through in writing and rewriting her autobiography. It appears to exist in several versions in manuscripts, and in each different kinds of censorship are afoot.
As her books began to be marketed successfully in the US she got a lot of fan mail, people who wrote about how the books distressed or otherwise strongly affected them. Her books apparently hit chords in people for real: they are frankly about alcoholism, infertility, depression, illegitimacy, family pathologies.
I recently read and posted on Kathleen Jones biography of Katherine Mansfield, Katherine Mansfield:The Story teller-if you have not read it yet I think you might love it-Jones researched it for eight years-it is a brilliant beautiful book worthy of its subject-I am now about 30 pages into her Passionate Sisterhood-I admit I have not read any of the work of Cavendish but your great post makes me feel I should-I really enjoyed and learned from your post-
I have in my posession a lovely seascape signed cookson with a stylised k in the name
with 35 below the name. The letters are separated by the lower part of the extendes k in the
name. Does anybody know if this is indeed the signature she used in her paintings?
I assumed you lived in England. See that. I grew up in the South East Bronx and know how hard and mean life can be there, but also know the people are victims of social and economic arrangements on top of these driving norms and that makes the experience even worse. It can be fixed, things could be so much better.
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