The Whip [Hardcover] COOKSON, CATHERINE. BCA edition 1983

Item Condition: Used; Good

Dust jacket tatty.

Somebody once told Emma that she was
made for trouble, and certainly it had
dogged her steps from childhood onwards.
Her earliest memories were of life with
one of the many small travelling shows-
part fair and part circus – that toured the
shires at the dawn of the Victorian era
But at the age of seven she found herself
an orphan who, in accordance with her
Spanish father's dying wishes, must now
leave this warm and friendly community
to live with an unknown English
grandmother far to the north in County
Durham. It was a reluctant parting, but
with her she took the whips and knives
used with such dexterity by her father in
his act and for which she had an inherited
skill; a strange legacy but one that would
play a significant role in shaping Emma's
destiny. No less significant was her
meeting with the kindly young parson
who helped her on her way to Boulder Hill
Farm, near the village of Fellburn. Here
life was to prove hard and demanding, and
her grandmother no better than a servant
to the Yorkless family. Spanning the
middle decades of the nineteenth century.
The Whip is one of Catherine Cookson's
longest and most powerful novels,
brilliantly sustained from first to last, rich
in character and incident, and presenting
in Emma one of this much-loved novelist's
most redoubtable and fascinating
heroines.