Cotters' England
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Edition: 1st uk ed.,
Condition remarks:
Book: Very good
Jacket: Very good
Pages: Yellowed
Condition remarks: price clipped dj.
In the grimy industrial heartland of post-war northern England, Christina Stead's Cotters' England presents a world of bleak terraced houses and fractured souls, anchored by the formidable and manipulative Nellie Cotter — a working-class woman whose passionate rhetoric masks a voracious hunger for emotional dominance over all who orbit her. Published in 1966, this unflinching novel chronicles the desperate lives of the English poor, tracing the corrosive relationships between siblings, lovers, and political idealists as they struggle against the suffocating weight of poverty, disillusionment, and psychological control. Stead writes with ferocious intensity and unflinching psychological precision, constructing Nellie as one of literature's most dangerously charismatic figures — a woman who devours those she claims to love. A fiercely political and deeply psychological work, Cotters' England stands as one of Stead's most underrated masterpieces, drawing on the rich tradition of British social realism while pushing it into far darker, more destabilising territory. The novel argues that class oppression is not merely economic but intimately personal — lived out in the body, in the bedroom, and in the tortured bonds between people who cannot escape their origins. Long overshadowed by her celebrated The Man Who Loved Children, this novel rewards those willing to sit with its discomfort, offering a portrait of mid-century England so raw and precise it reads less like fiction than a confession.
Author: Christina Stead
Format: Hardback
Published: 1967, Secker & Warburg
Genre: Modern fiction
Edition: 1st uk ed.,
Condition remarks:
Book: Very good
Jacket: Very good
Pages: Yellowed
Condition remarks: price clipped dj.
In the grimy industrial heartland of post-war northern England, Christina Stead's Cotters' England presents a world of bleak terraced houses and fractured souls, anchored by the formidable and manipulative Nellie Cotter — a working-class woman whose passionate rhetoric masks a voracious hunger for emotional dominance over all who orbit her. Published in 1966, this unflinching novel chronicles the desperate lives of the English poor, tracing the corrosive relationships between siblings, lovers, and political idealists as they struggle against the suffocating weight of poverty, disillusionment, and psychological control. Stead writes with ferocious intensity and unflinching psychological precision, constructing Nellie as one of literature's most dangerously charismatic figures — a woman who devours those she claims to love. A fiercely political and deeply psychological work, Cotters' England stands as one of Stead's most underrated masterpieces, drawing on the rich tradition of British social realism while pushing it into far darker, more destabilising territory. The novel argues that class oppression is not merely economic but intimately personal — lived out in the body, in the bedroom, and in the tortured bonds between people who cannot escape their origins. Long overshadowed by her celebrated The Man Who Loved Children, this novel rewards those willing to sit with its discomfort, offering a portrait of mid-century England so raw and precise it reads less like fiction than a confession.