ABSTRACT
Illegitimacy is the matrix out of which Catherine Cookson’s fiction comes. Cookson’s novels return repeatedly, even obsessively, to the theme of illegitimacy, the question of origins, and the secrets generated by the shame of bastardy. Given the circumstances of her own birth to an unmarried mother, this might appear simply to reflect her own experience. Yet reading her novels as a reflection of her autobiography-an interpretation which Cookson herself encouragedoversimplifies a particularly complex relationship between fiction and reality, not least because such an approach does not explain the huge popularity of her novels. Despite her long-lasting status as the “most borrowed author,”1 Cookson has, with a few honorable exceptions, mainly been ignored by academic literary critics. Her work seems to pose special challenges for the literary critic, partly because it does not do the kinds of things which we usually like texts to do. In this essay I want to focus on the central issue of illegitimacy in order to tease out some of the reasons why her work has been so neglected.
