04/09/2024
Kathleen Jones' new memoir, Reading My Mother, will be available on 15th September. Pre-order print copies from Bookends, Keswick or Carlisle here: https://www.bookscumbria.com/product/uk-books/biography-uk/reading-my-mother/
It's also available to pre-order from Amazon on this link: https://tinyurl.com/38uf5aba
In this haunting memoir, Kathleen Jones, acclaimed biographer of Christina Rossetti, Katherine Mansfield, and the women of the Wordsworth and Coleridge families, turns her forensic gaze on her own life – exploring how she fell in love with books, and how she overcame poverty, rural isolation, rigid class barriers and a tumultuous family, to become first a reader and then a writer.
With mixed Italian, Scottish and Irish heritage, Kathleen’s family had plenty of strong characters. They also had secrets, including illegitimacy, illicit love and even paedophilia. But in this memoir two very different women take centre stage – a mother held in a social and religious straitjacket, and a daughter who rebelled against the forces that kept women ‘in their place’.
After her mother Ella died, Kathleen found some tiny notebooks in a 1940s crocheted bag. They listed every book her mother had read for sixty years, since the end of the Second World War. Ella was a compulsive reader. In remote crofts and farmhouses beyond the reach of electricity in Cumbria, she taught Kathleen to read and helped her discover a world of story and adventure. Kathleen and her mother had little in common. Reading was almost the only thing they shared – but it became their salvation.
In this haunting memoir, Kathleen Jones, acclaimed biographer of Christina Rossetti and Katherine Mansfield, turns her forensic gaze on her own life – exploring how she fell in love with books, and how she overcame poverty, rural isolation, rigid class barriers and a tumultuous family, to become ....
