Novelist’s cosy Cornish ‘Aga sagas’ sold in their millions around the world

Rosamunde Pilcher, who has died aged 94, was a bestselling novelist specialising in sagas of middle-class cosiness set in and around her native county of Cornwall, exemplified in her recordbreaking blockbuster The Shell Seekers,

which became the most popular paperback in the world.

After years of turning out modestly successful romantic novels and short stories,

The Shell Seekers (1988) propelled her to international fame, selling more than five million copies in 15 languages. Its heroine, Penelope Keeling, was 64, as was Pilcher, though she maintained the character was not her. The secret of

Rosamunde

its success, she believed, was its

Pilcher

appeal to women with the leisure to read. novelist

Pilcher’s b September 22, 1924

domestic d February 6, 2019

dramas, often set in Aga-heated homes in and around the fictional Porthkerris (her version of St Ives), revolved around strong women coping with the vicissitudes of life, ageing parents, wayward children, ailing husbands, and assorted domestic upheavals. The books were entirely sex-free – and supermarket-free: any shopping was confined to trips to the grocer’s.

Her novels and dozens of short stories sold particularly well in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. German television adapted them into a series of more than 100 lushly shot films, shown on Sunday nights over 18 years.

Pilcher’s sanitised Cornwall became part of German popular culture and led to a large influx of German tourists into the county (a phenomenon that led to her winning the British Tourism Award in 2002). To many Germans, the elfin Pilcher was the quintessential Englishwoman. On visits to Berlin, she would be hugged in the street.

Rosamunde Scott was born in the north Cornish village of Lelant. Her father, a civil servant, was working in Burma and she was brought up by her mother, a somewhat remote woman who came from Orkney. She did well at school, but instead of going on to university took a secretarial course at the age of 17 and spent a year working for the Foreign Office before joining the Women’s Royal Naval Service.

During World War II, posted to Trincomalee in what was then Ceylon on a submarine depot ship, she wrote her first published short story, These Little Things, which she sold to Woman and Home magazine on VE-Day for £15.

After the war she returned home, and escaped her family by marrying Graham Hope Pilcher, a dashing former major in the Black Watch who had won a Military Cross. They met in St Ives but lived in Dundee, Scotland, where his family owned a jute factory, and they had five children together.

As her family grew, she sat at her elderly typewriter on the kitchen table and

‘I don’t know where Rosamunde Pilcher has been all my life. but now that I’ve found her, I’m not going to let her go.’’

New York Times book reviewer

hammered out ‘‘pink and pure’’ romances and short stories for Mills & Boon and later Collins, earning a steady £1000 a year under the nom de plume of Jane Fraser.

Early in the 1970s, when the American publisher St Martin’s Press bought a couple of her books, she broke into the US market, and writing under her real name saw her earnings rise to £20,000 a year. She sold all her English-speaking rights to the Americans, and found that her stories, set in the misty Scottish landscape of bog and heather, attracted a large and loyal following.

‘‘I don’t know where Rosamunde Pilcher has been all my life,’’ wrote a reviewer in The New York Times, ‘‘but now that I’ve found her, I’m not going to let her go.’’

The Shell Seekers, at 600-odd pages, was the first of her novels to be written at bumper length. Based on her childhood memories of Cornwall and London, it became the bestselling book in the US for 1989, was adapted into a television film starring Angela Lansbury, and made Pilcher rich. In 1994, one newspaper calculated that she was one of Britain’s top 10 female earners.

Yet she remained wary of wealth and what it could do to the balance of a relationship. ‘‘For years Graham had kept us all,’’ she recalled. ‘‘As my writing sold more, I could begin to do things like pay for holidays, but never more than the icing. He always baked the gingerbread. You have to be very gentle when that changes.’’

It was, perhaps, her concern for her husband’s feelings that led her to sign over the profits and copyright of her next two books, Coming Home and September, to her children. Having fulfilled a three-book deal, in 1995 she resolved not to write another novel, but in the event she produced a further four, concluding with Winter Solstice (2000). She was awarded an OBE in 2002.

She was sceptical about the pleasures of an afterlife, once telling The Daily Telegraph: ‘‘I can’t see it as anything other than the most hideous cocktail party. All you’d see would be the people you didn’t want to see, and all the ones you wanted to see you wouldn’t be able to find.’’

Graham Pilcher died in 2009. She is survived by two sons and two daughters. A fifth child, a girl, died at birth.