ABSTRACT
Catherine Cookson claimed that in the earlier years of her publishing career “some of my best writing was accomplished … books that I considered were the social history of the North East … interwoven into the lives of the people” (1986: 21). Yet the representations of the “people” of East Jarrow, and other industrial areas of Durham in these novels, are constructed on plot lines of romance, in which the desire on the part of Cookson’s protagonists to “speak differently … think differently” (1972: 77), suggests that her allegiance to the “vitality built on struggle” of a specifically “Geordie culture” is modified or compromised by narratives of social mobility or escape (cited in Jones 9). This chapter will examine the extent to which Cookson’s regional romances are consistent with her self-professed role as social historian, and argue that there is a tension or split between a narration that consolidates a relatively stable idea of regional identity and one that exceeds the boundaries of its perceived delimitation.
