The Mallen Streak, first published in 1973, is the first in the 'Mallen' trilogy of novels, which follow the fortunes of the Mallen family through succeeding generations in the nineteenth century. The second novel, The Mallen Girl, follows the fortunes of Barbara, the daughter of Thomas Mallen and the product of his incestuous rape of his niece, Barbara Farrington. The final novel in the series, The Mallen Litter, deals with Barbara's triplets (the 'litter' of the title) and "unwittingly, she watched as history began to repeat itself". The series was filmed in the 1970s by Granada television, and the novels as a whole have become the best known in Cookson's considerable body of popular historical sagas and romances. Its representative status and because of the more general issues of "women's popular fiction" and the basis for its popularity. The Mallen Streak contains many of the classic Cookson settings and ingredients (a 'northern England' setting, on the 'borders' of civilisation and "raw and rugged nature", often historical, featuring the lives and loves of families across generations, and concerned with families, desires, cruelty, madness, deceit, inheritances, marriages and lovers). As a family/historical saga it is typical also of a wider body of "women's fiction", with its emphasis on "family history" (as opposed to the 'History' of 'Kings and battles'), its emphasis also on the exploration of heterosexual relationships, and for its representation of "basic and natural" patterns of human motivation, will and desire within those families. One of the wider questions which I want to focus on is why such fiction is popular amongst women, or is directed at a female audience, and to introduce one or two arguments about the nature and effect of that popularity, but that's for later on in the session!