During her long writing career, Catherine Gaskin was known as the ‛Queen of Storytellers’. She wrote 21 bestselling novels, which sold millions of copies around the world. For five decades, Catherine’s books were a familiar sight on people’s bookshelves, and in bookshops and libraries. I can still picture the covers of the Catherine Gaskin books my mum and grandmothers read and lent to each other, when I was a child.
In more recent years, Catherine’s work has been sadly neglected; she retired from writing in 1988 and died in 2009. But her characters and stories remain as vibrant and gripping as ever. My imprint, Corazon Books, has just published The Property of a Gentleman, the first ever digital edition of a Catherine Gaskin novel. And as 2014 has been declared the Year of Reading Women, this seems the perfect time to introduce a new generation of readers to her work. So, if you aren’t familiar with the name Catherine Gaskin, here are five reasons why I think she still deserves to be called the ‛Queen of Storytellers’.She found her voice at an early age
Not many writers can say they were already a bestselling author by the age of 17! Catherine was still a schoolgirl when she decided that she wanted to be a writer. She was dedicated enough to get up early every morning and write for two hours before going to school. The completed novel was accepted by a large publisher, when she was just 16. Catherine was given permission to take some time off school to edit the manuscript. When the book was published the following year, it sold 50,000 copies in the first two months. Catherine never went back to school!
