ABSTRACT
The Mary Ann novels are narratives of desire. They are about Catherine Cookson’s own desire for peace of mind, a religion, and a secure, comfortable place in a coherent society, and they are about a whole aspirant generation of the English working class. In her search for escape from her breakdown Cookson created the character of Mary Ann, and gave her a name and a father and the childhood for which she longed. As Cookson develops the character of Mary Ann from eight years old to maturity, the novels reflect the social and religious changes of the time, and enable the modest aspirations of her characters and, by implication her readers, to be attained. Kathleen Jones, drawing from her own interview notes and correspondence with Cookson, quotes Cookson’s story of how “Katie/Mary Ann stepped out from the mirror again and told Catherine that she’d written four books already without remembering any of the pleasant or funny things that happened and, ‘It’s about time you changed your tune’ she said and wasn’t it time she featured as the heroine in Catherine’s story? ‘Aw go on,’ she urged, ‘a’ad like to be in a book!’” (1999: 215).1 So A Grand Man (1954) and the later Mary Ann novels resulted, lighter than any of her previous Jarrow novels and in sharp contrast to the work of the “angry young men” who were writing about the working class at the same time and whose fashionable novels and plays were about the drudgery and tensions of male working-class life (ibid.).
