One of the most popular writers of the 20th century, Catherine Cookson's story is as dramatic as any of her novels. Born in 1906, the illegitimate daughter of a domestic servant, she was brought up in Tyneside in one of the poorest communities of the western world. Her mother once begged barefoot from door to door and they lived in constant fear of the workhouse. But Catherine was determined to escape her situation and did so with enormous courage and energy, making her her way out of the slums of her childhood. After a tragic series of stillbirths and miscarriages, she attempted to write it all out. All of her 97 novels are still in print. But the damage she suffered as a child left Cookson vulnerable and her health precarious. In this biography, Kathleen Jones has delved into early drafts of Cookson's own autobiography, and has also used as background the hours of privately taped conversation in which Cookson discusses much that she chose to keep secret in her own lifetime: her tortured feelings for her mother, her own mental torment and terrors, and her intense and devastating relationship with Nan Smith, who almost succeeded in wrecking Catherine's marriage.