Introduction

This chapter presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the part three of this book. The part analyzes the ways in which working-class women’s sexuality is both celebrated and reviled in Up the Junction by a female observer. This observer, fascinated and horrified by the spectacle of otherness presented by her working-class female protagonists, establishes the latters’ identity through marking her self as different, less promiscuous, less working-class. The part discusses the responses to Cookson’s novels of predominantly working-class women readers from the region of England in which her novels are set. Among the many female voices interviewed by Thornham, Brown and Werndly who record the escapist function Cookson’s writings have in their lives, one lone voice of female protest stands out strongly, pronouncing her rejection of the Cookson image of a heroine because the structure of the narratives, centred as they are on the overcoming of adversity, condones female suffering as inevitable and ennobling.