Product Description

Rosie finds it hard to cope with her eldest sister's over-possessive nature. Since the death of their mother Beatrice has been insufferably dominating, taking over the running of the house and ruling their father and servants with an iron hand. She glories in being the mistress at Pine Hurst and never dreams of leaving. But when the girls' father dies unexpectedly their security is threatened, and Beatrice must lay plans to protect this most prized possession.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #170849 in Books
• Published on: 2008-01-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 384 pages

From the Back Cover
Rosie finds it hard to cope with her eldest sister’s over-possessive nature. Since the death of their mother, Beatrice has been insufferably dominating, taking over the running of Pine Hurst and ruling their father and servants with an iron hand. She glories in being the mistress of the house and never dreams of leaving.

But when the girls’ father dies unexpectedly, their security is threatened, and Beatrice must lay plans to protect this most prized possession.

The Obsession is one of Catherine Cookson's most unusual novels, powerfully portraying a woman dangerously driven by desire and ambition.

About the Author
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 bestselling 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.

Customer Reviews

PULP FICTION
This novel is so ordinary that it might even set some kind of record for sheer averageness. Everything about it - plot, characterisation, incidents, style - seems routine and practised. From start to finish I detected no genuine originality, no distinctive outlook, no depth in the portrayal of the actors, nothing that surprised me, little that really intrigued me and absolutely no distinction in the writing.

Even the supposed obsession that gives the book its title would have been hard to identify if I had not been told what it was in the synopsis on the dust-cover of my edition. There is a contrived and desperately commonplace denouement that purports to sum the matter up, but there has been little or nothing to be summed up earlier in the story. The person allegedly obsessed has not even been the focus of the narrative, which centres around her husband, and while she is certainly portrayed as unsympathetic and disagreeable the author doesn't link these attributes especially to her fixation on her grand house but more to the story of conjugal infelicity. There is, I should say, one really memorable character, namely Daisy, introduced towards the end of the narrative as if it needed some sort of pick-me-up, which it assuredly does. The other personae are relentlessly two-dimensional, and even the mise-en-scene is humdrum and reach-me-down. The date of the action is not stated, but it must be fairly late in the 19th century as the house has a mains gas-supply. My edition describes the work as a `historical' novel, but the only meaning I can attach to that is that is a `period' novel. If you look in it for any social criticism, any political angle, any sense of the world around it, you will look in vain, as I have just done. The class-system is simply taken for granted, with the upstairs cast behaving as to the manor born and the downstairs complement talking servantese as in the less imaginative kinds of TV dramas on similar themes.

The style of writing made me wonder whether the author gets round to much reading of her own these days. She certainly seems to have written an awful lot of books, and if this specimen is a fair representative of their quality it may be that she could benefit from catching up with some of the writing that is going on around her, a period of silence from her in the interests of that being a price well worth paying, even from her own point of view let alone ours. When I read ` "Oh!" - she wagged her head now - "great excitement last week" `, or `with her head now thoughtfully to one side, she added...', or `Beatrice practically tore her hands from the gentle grip', can I really be reading a novel written in the 1990's? To say nothing of putting the wince-making vulgarism `a coffee' into the mouth of the Victorian landowning class.

I was not expecting any Jane Austen of course, and what I got was a lot better than Barbara Cartland, but I know which of these authors' this book's quality seems to me to come nearer to.