ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the ways in which the sample of nineteen largely working-class women from the north-east of England, ’Catherine Cookson Country’, uses Cookson’s books and the women in them. The research was designed to find out what pleasures Cookson’s local readers get from her books, how they see the novels, and how they incorporate them into their own lives. The research method involved both questionnaire and interview. The questionnaire yielded a certain amount of statistical information, but was used mainly as a prompt for discussion, which was then transcribed. The women were asked to rank the qualities which a Cookson ‘hero’ and ‘heroine’ should have. The answers for the ‘hero’ were very similar to those given by Radway’s Smithton romance readers. Janice Radway suggests that, for her respondents, romance reading functions as a substitute for a ‘female community capable of rendering the so desperately needed affective support’.
