General problems of contemporary politics, of various ideologi­cal trends or theoretical currents treated in the works of Charles Percy Snow.

Charles Percy Snow was born in Leicester. By the end of the twenties he graduated from Cambridge University and went on work­ing there in the field of molecular physics. In 1930 he became a Fellow of his college. This academic life went on until the beginning of World War II, when he became a civil servant and was engaged in selecting scientific personnel. After the war C. P. Snow worked in industry and was appointed a Civil Service Commissioner, for excellent service he received a knighthood in 1957. His studies in physics are as widely known as his articles and lectures on both the relations between literature and science and literature and society.

During the sixties he visited the Soviet Union with his wife Pamela Hansford Johnson, a well-known English woman novelist. She is the author of socio-psychological novels An Avenue of Stone (1947), The Survival of the Fittest (1968), The Good Listener (1973), satirical novels The Unspeakable Skipton (1959), Cork Street, Next to the Hatter's (1965).

C.P.Snow began writing fiction in the thirties. His first novels were Death Under the Sail (1932) and The Search (1934). Six years later, in 1940, his novel Strangers and Brothers appeared. This novel was the opening book in a long sequence of novels written in the forties, fifties and sixties. Later Strangers and Brothers became the general title of the cycle.

The second novel entitled The Light and the Dark, was published in 1947. It was succeeded by Time of Hope (1949), The Masters (1951), The New Men (1954), Homecomings (1950), The Conscience of the Rich (1959) and The Affair (1960). In the 1960s Corridors of Power (1964) and The Sleep of Reason were added to the previous novels. The next novel, entitled Last Things was published in 1970.

In general C.P.Snow, true to critical realism, shows the pano­rama of English society in the prewar, war and post-war years. In Strangers and Brothers and Time of Hope one can see the middle class in an English provincial town, in The Light and the Dark - the aristocracy, in Corridors of Power - the upper English administra­tion. In The Masters and The Affairs the novelist reveals a profound knowledge of university life. He is particularly receptive to the con­flicts of the people belonging to different classes and social groups.

The Strangers and Brothers series of novels, record in the first person the experiences of a lawyer and government administrator named Lewis Eliot. These novels deal with his background, his strug­gles, his friends, his college at Cambridge, and the complicated society he lives in. The sequence of the novels is linked together through this autobiographical character. Sometimes he takes a di­rect part in the action, at other times he tells the story or comments on the events of the novel. Lewis Eliot, like Snow, was born in 1905. The author depicts his own experiences and his impressions of soci­ety from 1914 till the middle fifties. As a young man in Time of Hope Lewis falls deeply in love with a neurotic girl, Sheila. He courts her for years, and wins her confidence although he never wins her love. She falls in love with Hugh, a man as weak and uncertain as herself. In order to win Sheila, Lewis convinces Hugh that she is entirely mad and Hugh, always anxious to avoid compli­cations, disappears and never sees her again. Deprived of the only man she could love, Sheila turns to Lewis in desperation and mar­ries him. Lewis quite openly assumes the responsibility for her, yet, at the end of the novel, he begins to complain that his attention to Sheila has begun to ruin his career as a barrister.

In the novels that deal with the later life of Lewis, he frequently repeats that he has sacrificed his career for Sheila, acknowledging less and less as time goes on, his responsibility for her. Lewis Eliot is a lawyer, who belongs to the sphere of society as Snow himself. His views and standpoints are influenced by bourgeois society in which he was born. Thus Snow portrays his narrator as a love-sick young man, enterprising barrister, who is also a cool and intelligent govern­ment official and a compassionate family man with his second wife.

Strangers and Brothers end with Lewis Eliot, who is trying to contrive a dramatic acquittal for his friend George Passant, on a charge of fraud. Though acquitted, George is never entirely re­deemed by society. But he has had his moment of drama and re­mains a naive but noble man.

All these novels are full of trial scenes, startling revelations, and dramatic rehearsals which even Lewis Eliot's calm cannot tone down completely. Snow's novels are most effective when they relay on a kind of nostalgic social history, generally, the best novels are those dealing with the early days in Lewis Eliot's career. These scenes are de­scribed with ease, fondness and are rich in details.

Corridors of Power is a novel of the English top officials and statesmen of the fifties. The chief figure is a tough and ruthless English politician Roger Quaife, who wants to do something valua­ble with the power he has won. His effort to take Great Britain out of the nuclear arms race provides the centre of the story - a story of what men of action do, in success and in failure.

The main character of The Affairs, Donald Howard, a young scientist whose reputation for being a "Red" is known to the reactionary administration of Cambridge University, is to be expelled on the pretext of having falsified a scientific document.

Many people of different political views are involved in the con­flict and the novelist exposes their real motives covered by the mask of academic traditions.

Snow's novels in the cycle The Strangers and Brothers are first and foremost "problem novels". He had been particularly interested in such ethic problems as "humanism", "conscience", "justice", "truth", "power", and "sense of responsibility".

Sometimes these novels have been erroneously called "political" mainly because the author's attitude towards the British Establish­ment is critical though in these novels Snow solves different ethical problems from the point of view of an individual - the part played by an individual in society and the influence of society on the indi­vidual, why people are strangers to one another and not brothers, what interests unite them.

General problems of contemporary politics, of various ideologi­cal trends or theoretical currents are rarely treated in his work. In spite of the autobiographical nature of the whole cycle he carefully avoids giving his personal opinion, but tries to present some special conflict as impartially and objectively as possible. The main theme of his books is struggle for power: who will be elected? (The Mas­ters) Who will retire? (The Affair) Which party will win? (Corridors of Power), etc. This general theme of struggle for power is not presented as refined game, which involves many people, governed by different interests, emotions, traditions and laws.

12. Catherine Cookson – the best known and most prolific of all North Eastern English writers. Catherine Cookson is probably the best known and most prolific of all North Eastern English writers. Her novels combine human warmth, pathos, comedy and tragedy, and are told in a powerful narrative style. She said: "I was a story-teller from the time I could talk, and if I could get an audience, if I could get someone to listen to me... I used to pass the time, telling myself wonderful stories about us living in a nice house with lino on the stairs... one of the best ones I've ever told was about the wee folk, the little green men talking to me." Several of her novels have been adapted for television. She published over 90 highly popular novels which have been translated into twenty languages, among others into Finn­ish (over 30 works). In the 1990s Cookson's books have sold 90 million copies. Cookson became especially famous for her family sagas set against the backdrop of England in the 19th century. She wrote under the pseudonym Catherine Marchant, and produced three different series of books: the Bill Bailey series, Mary Ann series, and the Mallen series.

Catherine Cookson was born in Tyne Dock, Co. Durham, an in­dustrial region in the northeast of England on June 27, 1906. Unlike so many leading writers, she started life with many disadvan­tages. She was born illegitimate. Her mother was a poverty-stricken woman, at times an alcoholic and occasionally violent. Cookson had only the minimum of education. For many years Cookson believed that she had been abandoned as a baby and that her mother was actually her older sister.

From an early age Cookson was determined to become a writer. She was an avid reader and wrote her first short story, The Wild Irish Girl, when she was eleven, and sent it off to the South Shields Gazette, which returned it after three days. At the age of thirteen Cookson left school. She began working as a maid in the houses of the rich and powerful, witnessing the great class barrier inside wealthy society. From 1924 to 1929 she worked in a laundry and saved enough money to establish an apartment hotel in Hastings. One of the tenants was a local grammar-school master Tom Cookson, whom she married in 1940 at the age of 34. After several miscarriages she fell into a depression and started writing to recov­er. She joined the local writers' group for encouragement. During this period she changed from play writing to short stories. Cookson's first book, Kate Hannigan (1950), was partly autobiographi­cal. Her neighbors tried to stop its publication because Cookson dared in the first pages to write in detail about a baby being born. In the story Kate, a working-class girl, "becomes pregnant by an upper-middle-class man. The child is brought up by Kate's parents and she believes them to be her real parents, and Kate to be her sister.

Colour Blind (1953) is a story of a woman who marries a black man. Later their daughter suffers at the hands of classmates and a bitter uncle. The background is realistic, and offers an understand­ing picture of the British working class. In these early works as in the following books Cookson dealt with such social issues as class tensions and unemployment, among them The Black Candle (1989), set in the 19th-century and depicting a clash between two families.

Her first sixteen books Cookson wrote longhand, but started then to use a tape recorder, acting the parts of the characters she was writing about. Her husband worked as her private secretary and helped with grammar and spelling. Cookson's dialect was so strong that many outsiders had difficulties in understanding what she said. In 1968 her novel The Round Tower won an award as the best regional novel of the year. Cookson's autobiography, Our Kate, was published in 1969. Other autobiographical works include Catherine Cookson Country (1986), Let Me Make Myself Plain (1988), and Plainer Still (1695). Katie Mulholland is one of the best exam­ples of her work.

Many of Cookson's novels concern the poverty in the North East of England, and are set in mines and shipyards, or the farms and surrounding countryside in various periods from the nineteenth century onwards. The historical background is generally carefully researched. Her novels are about hardship, the intractability of life and of individuals, the struggle for first – to survive and next to make sense of one's survival. Humour, toughness, resolution and gener­osity are Cookson's virtues, in a world that she often depicts as cold and violent. She also used her own experiences of illegitimacy and poverty as material and recollections of her family and friends. Several novels are serialized, tracing events in the life of a single character or a family. Mary Ann Shaughnessy, a brave and warm­hearted heroine, appears in many books. Her other major series are The Mallen Family, Tilly Trotter, Hamilton, and BilI Bailey.

Usually Cookson's characters cross the class barrier by means of education. Tilly Trotter is taught to read and write by the parson's daughter and Kate Hannigan is educated by a kindly employer. Often Cookson's characters are outcasts, as Tilly who is viewed by the local villagers as a witch. During the story, beginning in the reign of the young Queen Victoria, she moves up and down the social scale. She becomes the mistress of a wealthy man, then the wife of his son. Exceptionally Tilly moves to the United States, Texas, which Cookson had never visited. As a source she used Comanches by T. R. Fehrenbach (1975), Sue Flanagan's Sam Houston's Texas (1964) and some other books but emphasized: "...I have tried within my capacity to keep to facts, but like most authors of novels I may have resorted now and again to a little licence; so should this be noted by a Texan I beg his forbearance, for after all I am merely a teller of tales." (from the "Author's Note" in Tilly Trotter Wed, 1981)

"But he had taught her to love, and that was a different thing; he had taught her that the act of love wasn't merely a physical thing, its pleasure being halved without the assistance of the mind. But it was Mr. Burgess, this old man breathing his last here now, who had taught her how to use her mind. Right from the beginning he had warned her that once your mind took you below the surface of mundane things, you would never again know real peace because the mind was an adventure, it led you into strange places and was forever asking why, and as the world outside could not give you true answers, you were forever groping and searching through your, spirit for the truth." (from Tilly Trotter Wed, 1981).

The trilogy dealing with the Mallen family saga began with The Mallen Streak (1973), and continued with The Malien Girl (1974), and The Mallen Lot (1974). The story is set in 19th-century North­umberland, and depicts the affairs of the family against the back­ground of past hidden sins.

Cookson received the Freedom of the Borough of South Shields, and an honorary degree from the University of Newcastle, and the Royal Society of Literature's award for the Best Regional Novel of the Year. The Variety Club of Great Britain named her Writer of the Year, and she was voted Personality of The North-East. In 1933 Cookson was made Dame.

Dame Catherine, who was born into poverty, died one of Brit­ain's wealthiest women in her home near Jesmond Dene, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, at 12.30pm, shortly before her ninety-second birthday, on June 11, 1998. Dame Catherine was revered on Tyneside, and South Tyneside Borough Council now markets itself as "Catherine Cookson Country."

Latest novels of Catherine Cookson are: Fenwick House, The Silent Lady, Rosie of the River, The Simple Soul, and Just a Saying. Posthumously published Kate Hannigan's Girl (1999) continues the story of her first novel.

Even though her first novel was not published until almost half-way through her life, Dame Catherine sold more than 100 million books in 30 different countries. The success of her books, which centered mostly on the Tyneside she grew up in, remained undiminished by modern life.

Best-selling author Barbara Taylor Bradford praised the work of a fellow writer: "I think she did what a novelist was supposed to do. She entertained, she brought human emotion to the paper."

The chairman of the Romantic Novelists'Association, Angela Arney said: "She was held in very high esteem. She didn't just write romantic novels but social history."

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