The Tinker's Girl

The Tinker's Girl

by Catheri Cookson (Author)

Synopsis

When young Jinnie Howlett's widowed father, a tinker man, died a pauper, she was indeed fortunate already to be an inmate of a northern workhouse, for with no other relatives, she might otherwise have ended up on the streets, a fate for children of her age that was, in the latter years of the nineteenth century, all too common. When, close to her fifteenth birthday and after years of toil and drudgery and an unfortunate experience at a previous workplace, she was at last offered a position as a maid-of-all-work, she was left in no doubt that this second chance was also her last. Jinnie's employers were to be the Shalemans and her place of work Tollet's Ridge Farm, a bleakly isolated and run-down sheep farm way out beyond Allendale and towards the Cumbrian border. It was only a matter of weeks before she discovered that she had exchanged one kind of drudgery for another, for the Shaleman family - Rose, invalid wife of Pug and mother to Bruce and Hal - demanded so much of her that she almost became nostalgic about her years at the house, as she called it. Fortunately for Jinnie, however, Bruce soon recognised that there was more to this seemingly vulnerable girl than the othe me

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More Information

Format: Hardcover
Pages: 352
Edition: 1st
Publisher: Bantam Press
Published: 06 Oct 1994

ISBN 10: 0593028511
ISBN 13: 9780593028513

Author Bio
Catherine Cookson was born in Tyne Dock, the illegitimate daughter of a poverty-stricken woman, Kate, whom she believed to be her older sister. She began work in service but eventually moved south to Hastings, where she met and married Tom Cookson, a local grammar-school master. Although she was originally acclaimed as a regional writer - her novel The Round Tower won the Winifred Holtby Award for the best regional novel of 1968 - her readership quickly spread throughout the world, and her many best-selling novels established her as one of the most popular of contemporary women novelists. After receiving an OBE in 1985, Catherine Cookson was created a Dame of the British Empire in 1993. She was appointed an Honorary Fellow of St Hilda's College, Oxford, in 1997. For many years she lived near Newcastle upon Tyne. She died shortly before her ninety-second birthday, in June 1998.