The day the bride came to Fell Rise, the bridegroom had already begun to fear she might not settle easily into the big house on the hill just outside the Tyneside town of Fellburn. For Joe Remington this had always been his home, but for Elaine - Elly, as he liked to call her - whom he had married within three months of their meeting in London, it was virtually another country whose manners and customs she was by no means eager to accept. She made plain her disapproval of Joe's familiarity with the servants, and showed instant resentment of David Brooks: to her an over-indulged chauffeur-gardener of obviously mixed blood, but to her husband more of a friend and companion from childhood days. Right now, however, Joe had worries beyond Elly's prejudices, for it was May 1926, and at midnight a General Strike would begin, the effects of which would nowhere be felt more acutely than in this heartland of the industrial North-East.
Joe's fears were soon confirmed as Elly's capacity for rubbing up local people the wrong way made her increasingly unpopular with the staff. She demanded to see accounts Joe had always trusted to their care. She questioned the donation of food to the striking miners' families in the village. She even decreed that, because of the similarity of their names, the housemaid Ella should henceforth be known as Jane! This mounting tension was only too apparent to Joe's father, Mike. Severe arthritis might confine him to the upper floors of the house, but from this vantage point he missed nothing and remained a powerful influence in the affairs of Fell Rise.
Not wishing to be tied down with children so soon, Elly saw her early pregnancy as a disaster, to be made bearable only by the willingness of her unmarried sister Betty to come and see her through her confinement. But in the long run, would Betty's presence only serve to widen the rift between husband and wife, or would she help to bring about a reconciliation?
Catherine Cookson's powerful story spans the years of change leading into the Second World War, exploring the many facets of a marriage based on initial passion, and opening the hearts and minds of all those who dwell at Fell Rise. Justice is a Woman will delight this most popular author's millions of readers in many lands.
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 Wlnlfred Holtby Award for the best regional novel of 1968 - her readership quickly spread throughout the world, and her many best-selling 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.