Josephine Cox

Josephine Cox was a bestselling English novelist of family sagas. She is the author of more than 60 books. Cox sold over 20 million copies of her books, which combined romance and tragedy to dramatic. According to the UK Public Lending Rights figures, Cox was one of the top three most borrowed authors from British libraries.

Cox also wrote under the name Jane Brindle, after her mother. She was also known as Jo Cox.

Josephine Cox was born in Blackburn, one of ten children. At sixteen, Josephine met and married her husband Ken, and had two sons. When the boys started school, she decided to go to college and eventually gained a place at university but was unable to take this up as it would have meant living away from home. Instead, she went into teaching — and started to write her first full-length novel.

Josephine Cox debuted with Her Father's Sins in 1988. She wrote her first novel in six weeks while Cox was in the hospital.

“Every one of us has something deep inside that we would love to do, and then life takes over and you don’t get to do it. But when I was teaching, I was confined to bed in the hospital because I was very ill,” she told the Guardian. “One of my friends brought me an A4 book and half a dozen pens because I was always talking about ‘that book’ I was going to write about growing up in Blackburn. I wrote the book in six weeks in the hospital. It was a culmination of everything that was in me from the age of eight.”

Her most recent book published during her lifetime was Two Sisters, which came out in February 2020.

Josephine Cox passed away in July 2020, but her writing lives on through Gilly Middleton, who worked with Jo as a co-writer and is now bringing Jo’s original ideas to fruition.

Photo credit: FB @jocoxbooks