Kathleen Jones

First published in 1975, Opening the Door is a survey of policies and problems in services for the mentally handicapped. It describes the improvements which have taken place since 1969, when the inquiry into conditions of patients at Ely hospital in South Wales stimulated public concern into the quality of life of many mentally handicapped people in hospital. The authors discuss the continuing gap between the idea – as laid down in the 1971 Government White Paper, Better Services for the Mentally Handicapped, which set out a blueprint for development in the 1980s that was to make the antithesis of ‘hospital’ or ‘community’ obsolete – and the reality. The study is based on detailed work in one Region by a team of staff and postgraduate students in the Department of Social Administration and Social Work at the University of York. The survey covers hospital provisions, with special attention to nursing attitudes and to problems of the ‘back wards,’ the relationship between hospitals and their surrounding communities, and the development of local authority social work and residential care services. This book will be of interest to students of social administration, social policy and health.

First published in 1978, Issues in Social Policy is designed as a basic textbook for social administration students in universities, polytechnics and similar institutions, and for students in allied fields such as medicine, nursing and public administration. What is meant when we talk of ‘equality’ and ‘equity’ as social goals? Do the two conflict? What are the social needs and the social resources which our society tries to reconcile? Is voluntary social service any more than a frill tacked on an expanding statutory empire – or perhaps a way of cutting public expenditure? Is there a conflict between universalist and selectivist social policies? What is the impact of deviancy theory on social policy? Is the growing professionalisation of social work in the true interests of clients? These are some of the questions which form the material of the book. The authors see the development of social policy as central to the development of a more just society, and the academic study of issues in social policy as crucial to clear thinking and effective action.

First published in 1972, A History of the Mental Health Services is a revised and abridged version of both Lunacy, Law and Conscience and Mental Health and Social Policy, rewriting the material from the end of the Second World War to the passing of the Mental Health Act 1959, and adding a new section which runs from 1959 to the Social Services Act 1970. The story starts with the first legislative mention of the ‘furiously and dangerously mad’ as a class for whom some treatment should be provided, traces the development of reform and experiment in the nineteenth century, and the creation of the asylum system, and ends in the age of Goffman and Laing and Szasz with the virtual disappearance of the system. The book will be of interest to students of mental health, sociology, social policy, health policy and law.

First published in 1984, Ideas on Institution is a review of the major English-language literature of the past two decades on the experience of living in institutions - hospitals, mental hospitals, prisons. The survey opens with a consideration of the writings of Erving Goffman, Michael Foucault, and Thomas Szasz. They shattered the liberal consensus that the purpose of imprisonment was to reform. Instead, their work argued that the purpose of prisons and mental hospitals was social control, and that prisons created criminals, and mental facilities created mental illness. Part II looks at four British studies : Russell Barton's Institutional Neurosis which suggested the existence of a new disease entity; Peter Townsend's The Last Refuge, a study of old people in residential care; The Morrisses’ Pentonville, a study of a London prison which became a classic in criminology; and Sans Everything, a symposium which paved the way for a series of official hospital enquiries in the 1970s. Part III examines David Rothman's two historical studies on how and why the U.S. constructed institutions, and how and why reform movements failed; N.N. Kittrie's The Right to be Different, a wide-ranging attack on the compulsory treatment of a variety of 'deviants', including the mentally ill, juvenile delinquents and drug abusers; Cohen and Taylor's Psychological survival, a disturbing analysis of the lives of long-term prisoners in a maximum security wing; Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment on the malignant effects of prison conditions on the personalities of both prisoners and their guards; and King and Elliott's study of Albany Prison, showing how a promising therapeutic experiment went wrong. This book will be of interest to students of history, gerontology, sociology, social policy, penology, psychology and political science.

What influence do the books we read when we're growing up have on us? In this haunting memoir, Kathleen Jones, acclaimed biographer of Christina Rossetti and Katherine Mansfield, turns her forensic gaze on her own life - exploring how she fell in love with books, and how she overcame poverty, rural isolation, rigid class barriers and a tumultuous family, to overcome working class and gender stereotypes to become a feminist and then a writer. With mixed Italian, Scottish and Irish heritage, Kathleen's family had plenty of strong characters. They also had secrets, including illegitimacy, illicit love and even paedophilia. But in this memoir two very different women take centre stage - a mother held in a social and religious straitjacket, and a daughter who rebelled against the forces that kept women 'in their place'. Kathleen left home at sixteen, leaving the wilderness for London, where she hoped to discover how to be an author.The memoir explores the fraught relationship between mother and daughter, a bond loosened by distance, and the struggle for the daughter to find an independent identity.After her mother Ella died, Kathleen found some tiny notebooks in a 1940s crocheted bag. They listed every book her mother had read for sixty years, since the end of the Second World War. Ella was a compulsive reader. In remote crofts and farmhouses beyond the reach of electricity, she taught Kathleen to read and helped her discover a world of story and adventure. Kathleen and her mother had little in common. Reading was almost the only thing they shared - but it became their salvation, creating an understanding between reader and writer.

First published in 1975, Opening the Door is a survey of policies and problems in services for the mentally handicapped. It describes the improvements which have taken place since 1969, when the inquiry into conditions of patients at Ely hospital in South Wales stimulated public concern into the quality of life of many mentally handicapped people in hospital. The authors discuss the continuing gap between the idea – as laid down in the 1971 Government White Paper, Better Services for the Mentally Handicapped, which set out a blueprint for development in the 1980s that was to make the antithesis of ‘hospital’ or ‘community’ obsolete – and the reality. The study is based on detailed work in one Region by a team of staff and postgraduate students in the Department of Social Administration and Social Work at the University of York. The survey covers hospital provisions, with special attention to nursing attitudes and to problems of the ‘back wards,’ the relationship between hospitals and their surrounding communities, and the development of local authority social work and residential care services. This book will be of interest to students of social administration, social policy and health.

First published in 1978, Issues in Social Policy is designed as a basic textbook for social administration students in universities, polytechnics and similar institutions, and for students in allied fields such as medicine, nursing and public administration. What is meant when we talk of ‘equality’ and ‘equity’ as social goals? Do the two conflict? What are the social needs and the social resources which our society tries to reconcile? Is voluntary social service any more than a frill tacked on an expanding statutory empire – or perhaps a way of cutting public expenditure? Is there a conflict between universalist and selectivist social policies? What is the impact of deviancy theory on social policy? Is the growing professionalisation of social work in the true interests of clients? These are some of the questions which form the material of the book. The authors see the development of social policy as central to the development of a more just society, and the academic study of issues in social policy as crucial to clear thinking and effective action.

First published in 1972, A History of the Mental Health Services is a revised and abridged version of both Lunacy, Law and Conscience and Mental Health and Social Policy, rewriting the material from the end of the Second World War to the passing of the Mental Health Act 1959, and adding a new section which runs from 1959 to the Social Services Act 1970. The story starts with the first legislative mention of the ‘furiously and dangerously mad’ as a class for whom some treatment should be provided, traces the development of reform and experiment in the nineteenth century, and the creation of the asylum system, and ends in the age of Goffman and Laing and Szasz with the virtual disappearance of the system. The book will be of interest to students of mental health, sociology, social policy, health policy and law.

First published in 1984, Ideas on Institution is a review of the major English-language literature of the past two decades on the experience of living in institutions - hospitals, mental hospitals, prisons. The survey opens with a consideration of the writings of Erving Goffman, Michael Foucault, and Thomas Szasz. They shattered the liberal consensus that the purpose of imprisonment was to reform. Instead, their work argued that the purpose of prisons and mental hospitals was social control, and that prisons created criminals, and mental facilities created mental illness. Part II looks at four British studies : Russell Barton's Institutional Neurosis which suggested the existence of a new disease entity; Peter Townsend's The Last Refuge, a study of old people in residential care; The Morrisses’ Pentonville, a study of a London prison which became a classic in criminology; and Sans Everything, a symposium which paved the way for a series of official hospital enquiries in the 1970s. Part III examines David Rothman's two historical studies on how and why the U.S. constructed institutions, and how and why reform movements failed; N.N. Kittrie's The Right to be Different, a wide-ranging attack on the compulsory treatment of a variety of 'deviants', including the mentally ill, juvenile delinquents and drug abusers; Cohen and Taylor's Psychological survival, a disturbing analysis of the lives of long-term prisoners in a maximum security wing; Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment on the malignant effects of prison conditions on the personalities of both prisoners and their guards; and King and Elliott's study of Albany Prison, showing how a promising therapeutic experiment went wrong. This book will be of interest to students of history, gerontology, sociology, social policy, penology, psychology and political science.

HE COURTED HER WITH PUNCH LINESMiddle-aged stand-up comedian Josh Steinberg, formerly the star of his own popular TV series, finds himself struggling to keep his career alive, playing seedier and seedier clubs. Plump, balding, and plain-looking, he has never had much luck with women. That is, until Josh meets Holly Brannigan while performing his stand-up act in a comedy club. Holly, an attractive, intelligent, and divorced 50-year-old businesswoman, becomes instantly smitten with Josh and even finds his unconventional looks wildly sexy.The lonely and vulnerable Josh soon falls in love with Holly, even though she's not the statuesque type he usually goes for. But Josh, terrified of being hurt and discarded by yet another woman, hides his true feelings for Holly by making fun of her in his stand-up act. And Holly, taking Josh's words to heart, starts to wonder if she means anything to him at all.

Christina was the youngest of the four Rossetti children, born in England to Italian parents. Although she and her brother, the artist Dante Gabriel, were known as the 'two storms', Christina's passionate nature was curbed in a way that her brother's was not, as she submitted to the social and religious pressures that lay so heavily on Victorian women. Like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, she suffered the tyranny of a loving family. Her sister Maria's influence was described as 'a species of police surveillance', and Christina was always careful never to write anything that would hurt her mother. Often referred to as the 'High Priestess of Pre-Raphaelitism' Christina had a genuine lyric gift that could articulate both the joy of being alive and the bitterness of loss. Her desire for poetic excellence and moral excellence were continually in conflict and her poetry betrays the corrosive effect of this struggle. Christina's deliberate self-effacement, Dante Gabriel's portrayal of her as the meek virgin and William Rossetti's subjective role as editor and interpreter of her work have gradually blotted out the passionate lively spirit who wrote 'Goblin Market' - one of the most complex and disturbing poems ever written. Kathleen Jones looks at Christina's life alongside that of other nineteenth-century women writers - notably Emily Bront , Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Emily Dickinson.

Catherine Cookson was an illegitimate child brought up in one of the poorest places in the western world. She left school at 13 to become a domestic servant and was later employed in a workhouse laundry. Yet she became one of the best selling novelists of all time and one of the richest women in Britain. Her story is as fascinating as any of her novels, with a plot that includes abandonment, abuse, alcoholism, extreme poverty, and a love affair that almost wrecked Catherine's life and her marriage. She survived it all because she was driven by an ambition so strong it overcame everything to make her a household name. Drawing on tapes recorded by Catherine Cookson herself, personal testimony and original research, Kathleen Jones tells the story of Catherine Cookson's life and goes on a quest to find her absent father - the enigmatic 'Alexander Davies'.

Twelve characters, twelve stories, a year in the life of a small Italian town. What will happen to Pia, the young Greek barista, who is in love with the son of the town's leading fascist? And how is her fate connected to the sisters who run the shoe shop - Olimpia and Marina? They've shared the same bed since they were children, but they have secrets. Clara, the midwife, knows everyone's secrets, but not the fate of her absent son. Living alone, she extends her hospitality to illegal migrants and refugees.Times are hard in Italy. Among the buskers and tourists that crowd the piazza, the residents make a precarious living. In the pizzeria on the corner, Franco is trying to save his marriage and his business. Rose Umber, a young Canadian sculptor, is desperate to remain in Italy when her visa runs out, but that might depend on a decision taken by the elegant Milanese woman, Anastasia, who walks her badly-behaved dog, Fidel, through the piazza every day. Separate but connected, their lives - like their stories - are intertwined within the walls of this historic town.

Kathleen Jones travelled to the islands of Haida Gwaii off the northernmost coastline of British Columbia, to visit a nation who have lived in harmony with their environment for more than ten thousand years. They have a saying, 'Everything is Connected', and their philosophy, Yah' Guudang, is about 'respect and responsibility, about knowing our place in the web of life, and how the fate of our culture runs parallel with the fate of the ocean, sky and forest people'. But there is a darker side to Haida history - the story of how the British Colonial administration reduced the population from more than twenty thousand to just over five hundred by a policy that has been identified as 'cultural genocide'.

This is Volume II of seven in a collection on the Sociology of Mental Health. Originally published in 1955, this study presents the social history of the care of the insane from 1744 to 1845.