'Reading my Mother' with Kathleen Jones

In our April Words on Wednesday event, we’re delighted to welcome highly-acclaimed biographer and Cumbrian native, Kathleen Jones to the floor.

When Kathleen Jones discovered a unique set of historic reading notebooks, it led her to turn her forensic gaze on her own life in her new book, Reading My Mother.

“I found some tiny notebooks in a 1940’s crocheted bag after my mother died at the age of 84. Within their pages were lists of every single book my mother had read over 60 years, since the end of the Second World War. She recorded every book and what she thought of it. I’m not sure if anybody else has ever done this over such a long period.”

Reading My Mother forms the first part of Penrith-based Kathleen Jones’ two-part memoir, a powerful tale that explores how Kathleen, author of the Virago classic, A Passionate Sisterhood, and a Royal Literary Fund Fellow, overcame poverty, rural isolation, rigid class barriers and a tumultuous family, to become first a reader and then a writer.

Kathleen Jones lives in the English Lake District and is a Sunday Times best-selling author of biography, fiction and poetry. Her subjects include Katherine Mansfield, Catherine Cookson, Christina Rossetti, and the women of the Wordsworth and Coleridge families (which became a Virago Classic). Kathleen worked in broadcast journalism in England and the Middle East, and is also the author of two historical novels (one of which was the Historical Novel Society’s ‘Book of the Year’) and four collections of poetry. She has taught creative writing for the Open University and the University of Newcastle and became a Royal Literary Fund Fellow in 2007.