Josephine Cox

Author

BEST-SELLER: Author Josephine Cox who sold over 200 million books and has died at the ages of 82. PICTURES: HARPERCOLLINS PUBLISHERS/PA

JOSEPHINE COX, who has died at 82, was one of Britain’s best selling and best read authors, having sold more than 200m copies of 60 different books.

Her works, sometimes written under her mother’s name of Jane Brindle, included The Beachcomber, Her Father’s Sins and her most recent, Two Sisters, another best-seller.

A native of Blackburn in Lancashire, Josephine Brindle was one of 10 living under a single roof with her father, a road sweeper, in what she described as a cotton mill house. Her mother, whose first husband had been a bigamist, walked out of her second marriage when Josephine was 14.

Two years after that, Josephine married her husband, Ken Cox.

By that time, she had begun writing short stories and selling them to her school friends for a penny for each. Her talent

was recognised by one of her teachers, who predicted she would end up in print – but it was to be several decades before he was proved right.

She began studying at college when her children started school, and earned a place at Cambridge but was unable to accept because it would have meant living away from home.

Instead she went into teaching and began writing

Her Father’s Sins, which would become her first novel. In it, and her subsequent works, she drew upon her impoverished background as well as on such recurring themes as religion, illegitimacy and abuse.