Dr Rodney Prince's desire for a family had been frozen out by a wife who had wanted Harley Street, not a Tyneside slum. By contrast, Kate Hannigan glowed with a warmth that was out of place in the grime and squalor of the Fifteen Streets. And so, between Rodney Prince, a wealthy man locked in an unhappy marriage, and Kate Hannigan, a bastard child of the slums, grew a love that opposed all the concepts of an Edwardian society.About the Author: Catherine Cookson was born in Tyne Dock, the illegitimate daughter of a poverty-stricken woman, Kate, whom she believed to be her older sister. At the age of forty she began writing about the lives of the working-class people with whom she had grown up, using the place of her birth as the background to many of her novels. Her many bestselling 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 died shortly before her ninety-second birthday in June 1998.