Catherine Cookson (1906-1998)

The author Catherine Cookson transformed herself from a workhouse laundress in the 1920s to the most borrowed author from Britain’s public libraries. As a young woman, Catherine struggled to improve her mind by reading, but she didn’t know which books to read. She went to her public library in South Shields for the first time and borrowed Letters of Lord Chesterfield to His Son. The intoxicating mix of mythology, history, geography and travel sent her on a lifelong reading adventure through Chaucer, Donne, Gibbon and James Joyce and fired her determination to write. Catherine eventually became one of the best-selling authors of all time, whose titles made up 33 per cent of all loans made from British public libraries. She said of that first library book: “Dear, dear Lord Chesterfield, snob or not I owe him so much.” As a low-paid worker, she could never have bought that first book; a free public library service changed her life forever, as it has done for so many other people.