Kate's Daughter gets to the heart of the Catherine Cookson story. With the help of material only made available since Catherine's death, Piers Dudgeon, lifts the veil on the myth and lays bare the true nature of this complex and fascinating woman. When it was known that Kate's Daughter was being written, close family made contact with the author to unburden themselves of material they had always refused to share when Catherine was alive. People who knew her when she was a child and at every stage of her life also came forward to set the record straight. Meanwhile Catherine's written records, letters and diaries, only recently lodged in the Catherine Cookson archive at the University of Boston, were made available. What emerges is a documentary portrait, illustrated with contemporary photographs (many provided by her family and never seen before), shot through with a psychological dimension that explains for the first time the fears that cast Catherine into the nightmare of mental breakdown and strung the very darkest veins of autobiography in her novels.