Rosamunde Pilcher

Template:Short description Template:Use dmy dates Template:Use British English Template:Infobox writer Rosamunde E. M. L. Pilcher, OBE (Template:Née; 22 September 1924 – 6 February 2019)<ref name=":0">Template:Cite web</ref> was a British novelist, best known for her sweeping novels set in Cornwall. Her books have sold over 60 million copies worldwide.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> Early in her career she was published under the pen name Jane Fraser. In 2001, she received the Corine Literature Prize's Weltbild Readers' Prize for Winter Solstice.

Early and personal life

She was born Rosamunde Scott on 22 September 1924 in Lelant, Cornwall. Her parents were Helen (Template:Née) and Charles Scott, a British civil servant.<ref name=":0" /> Just before her birth her father was posted in Burma, while her mother remained in England.<ref name="WorldAuthors">Template:Citation</ref> She attended the School of St. Clare in Penzance and Howell's School Llandaff before going on to Miss Kerr-Sanders' Secretarial College.<ref name="bookreporter">Template:Cite web</ref> She began writing when she was seven, and published her first short story when she was 18.<ref name="binchy"/>

From 1943 until 1946, Pilcher served with the Women's Royal Naval Service. On 7 December 1946, she married Graham Hope Pilcher,<ref name="bookreporter"/> a war hero and jute industry executive who died in March 2009.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> They moved to Dundee, Scotland. They had two daughters and two sons.<ref name="butt"/> Her son, Robin Pilcher, is also a novelist.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Pilcher died on 6 February 2019, at the age of 94, following a stroke.<ref name=Guardian_Flood />

Writing career

In 1949, Pilcher's first book, a romance novel, was published by Mills and Boon, under the pseudonym Jane Fraser. She published a further ten novels under that name. In 1955, she also began writing under her real name with Secret to Tell. By 1965 she had dropped the pseudonym and was signing her own name to all of her novels.<ref name="bookreporter"/>

The breakthrough in Pilcher's career came in 1987, when she wrote the family saga The Shell Seekers, her fourteenth novel under her own name.<ref name="Guardian_Flood">Template:Cite news</ref> It focuses on an elderly British woman, Penelope Keeling, who relives her life in flashbacks, and on her relationship with her adult children. Keeling's life was not extraordinary, but it spans "a time of huge importance and change in the world."<ref name="binchy">Template:Cite news</ref> The novel describes the everyday details of what life during World War II was like for some of those who lived in Britain.<ref name="binchy"/> The Shell Seekers sold around ten million copies and was translated into more than forty languages.<ref name=":0" /> It was adapted for the stage by Terence Brady and Charlotte Bingham.<ref name="butt">Template:Cite news</ref> Pilcher was said to be among the highest-earning women in Britain by the mid-1990s.<ref name=BBC_obit>Template:Cite web</ref>

Her other major novels include September (1990), Coming Home (1995) and Winter Solstice (2000).<ref name=Guardian_Flood /><ref name="Musumeci">Template:Cite book</ref> Coming Home won the Romantic Novel of the Year Award by Romantic Novelists' Association in 1996.<ref name="RoNAAwards">Template:Citation</ref> The president of the association in 2019, the romance writer Katie Fforde, considers Pilcher to be "groundbreaking as she was the first to bring family sagas to the wider public".<ref name=Guardian_Flood /> Felicity Bryan, in her obituary for The Guardian, writes that Pilcher took the romance genre to "an altogether higher, wittier level"; she praises Pilcher's work for its "grittiness and fearless observation" and comments that it is often more prosaic than romantic.<ref name=":0" />

Pilcher retired from writing in 2000.<ref name="bookreporter"/> Two years later, in the 2002 New Year Honours, she was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to literature.<ref name="obe">Template:Cite news</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

TV adaptations

Her books are especially popular in Germany because the national television station ZDF (Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen) has produced more than a hundred of her stories as TV movies, starting with The Day of the Storm in 1993. A complete list can be found on the German Wikipedia: Rosamunde Pilcher (Filmreihe). These television films are some of the most popular programmes on ZDF.<ref name=BBC_obit /><ref name="Guardian_Jakat">Template:Cite web</ref> Pilcher was awarded the British Tourism Award in 2002 for the positive effect the books and the adaptations have had on Cornish tourism.<ref name=BBC_obit /> Notable film locations include Prideaux Place, a 16th-century mansion near Padstow.<ref name=Guardian_Jakat />

• A television adaptation of The Shell Seekers (dir. Waris Hussein), starring Angela Lansbury, was made in 1989.<ref name=BBC_obit />
• September (dir. Colin Bucksey, 1996), starring Jacqueline Bisset, Michael York, Edward Fox, Jenny Agutter and Mariel Hemingway
• A two-part television adaptation of Coming Home (dir. Giles Foster), made by Yorkshire Television, was broadcast in 1998, starring Keira Knightley, Emily Mortimer, Peter O'Toole, Joanna Lumley, Penelope Keith, David McCallum, Paul Bettany, Patrick Ryecart and Susan Hampshire, among others.
• Nancherrow (dir. Simon Langton, 1999), starring Joanna Lumley, Patrick Macnee and Senta Berger
• Winter Solstice (dir. Martyn Friend, 2003), starring Sinéad Cusack, Peter Ustinov, Jean Simmons and Geraldine Chaplin
• Summer Solstice (dir. Giles Foster, 2005), starring Jacqueline Bisset, Honor Blackman and Franco Nero
• The Shell Seekers (dir. Piers Haggard, 2006), starring Vanessa Redgrave and Maximilian Schell
• Four Seasons (dir. Giles Foster, 2008), starring Tom Conti, Senta Berger, Michael York, Franco Nero, Juliet Mills and Frank Finlay
• Rosamunde Pilcher's Shades of Love (dir. Giles Foster, 2010), starring Charles Dance
• The Other Wife (dir. Giles Foster, 2012), starring Rupert Everett
• Template:Ill (dir. Giles Foster, 2014), starring Greg Wise, James Fox, Jane Seymour and Julian Sands
• Valentine's Kiss (dir. Sarah Harding, 2015), starring Rupert Graves and John Hannah

Partial bibliography

Novels

As Jane Fraser

• Half-Way to the Moon (1949)<ref name=WDir_1980-82>Template:Cite book</ref>
• The Brown Fields (1951)<ref name=WDir_1980-82 />
• Dangerous Intruder (1951)<ref name=WDir_1980-82 />
• Young Bar (1952)<ref name=WDir_1980-82 />
• A Day Like Spring (1953)<ref name=WDir_1980-82 />
• Dear Tom (1954)<ref name=WDir_1980-82 />
• Bridge of Corvie (1956)<ref name=WDir_1980-82 />
• A Family Affair (1958)<ref name=WDir_1980-82 />
• A Long Way from Home (1963)<ref name=WDir_1980-82 />
• The Keeper's House (1963)<ref name=WDir_1980-82 />

As Rosamunde Pilcher

• A Secret to Tell (1955)<ref name=WDir_1980-82 />
• On My Own (1965)<ref name=WDir_1980-82 />
• Sleeping Tiger (1967)<ref name=WDir_1980-82 />
• Another View (1969)<ref name=WDir_1980-82 />
• The End of Summer (1971)<ref name=WDir_1980-82 />
• Snow in April (1972)<ref name=WDir_1980-82 />
• The Empty House (1973)<ref name=WDir_1980-82 />
• The Day of the Storm (1975)<ref name=WDir_1980-82 />
• Under Gemini (1977)<ref name=WDir_1980-82 />
• Wild Mountain Thyme (1979)<ref name=WDir_1980-82 />
• The Carousel (1982)<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
• Voices in Summer (1984)<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
• The Shell Seekers (1987)<ref name=Musumeci />
• September (1990)<ref name=Musumeci />
• Coming Home (1995)<ref name=Musumeci />
• Winter Solstice (2000)<ref name=Musumeci />

Short-story collections

• The Blue Bedroom and Other Stories (1985)<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
• Flowers in the Rain: And Other Stories (1991)<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
• The Key (1996)<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
• A Place Like Home (2021)<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Non-fiction

• The World of Rosamunde Pilcher (1996) (autobiography)
• Christmas with Rosamunde Pilcher (1997)

External links

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