The Courier & Advertiser (Angus and Dundee)
Bestselling author Rosamunde Pilcher has died in Dundee aged 94 – after living in the area for 34 years. The novelist wrote the most popular paperback in the world, The Shell Seekers.
Writer found fame with bestselling novel The Shell Seekers
Bestselling author Rosamunde Pilcher has died in Dundee aged 94.
The novelist penned the most popular paperback in the world, The Shell Seekers, which was selected as one of the BBC’S top 100 best-loved novels of all time in 2003.
Rosamunde Pilcher was born on September 22, 1924 in Cornwall to an Orcadian mother and a father who was a civil servant working in Burma and lived on Tayside for many years.
Her earliest schooling consisted of lessons with a vicar’s wife until the age of eight, when she was sent to St Clare’s, Polwithin, Penzance.
She later attended Howells’s School, Llandaff, before completing a secretarial shorthand course at the age of 17.
Mrs Pilcher then spent a year working for the Foreign Office at Woburn Abbey, but was disenchanted by the tediousness of the job and joined the Women’s Royal Naval Service.
Mrs Pilcher had been writing seriously since the age of 14 and had her first short story, These Little Things, published during the Second World War when she was on board a submarine depot ship.
The story appeared in Woman and Home and sold for the princely sum of £15.
After the war she married Graham Hope Pilcher, a former major in The Black Watch and the son of a Dundee jute factory owner.
The couple came to live on Tayside and over the next 34 years her husband became a prominent figure in the local textile industry.
She continued to write at the kitchen table using an old typewriter after the birth of five children, one of whom tragically died at birth.
Mrs Pilcher spent years writing romances and short stories for Mills and Boon and later Collins, under the pen name Jane Fraser.
Her earlier work was modestly successful but it was The Shell Seekers that propelled her to international fame when it sold more than five million copies in 15 languages.
In the book, her heroine, Penelope Keeling, was 64 – Rosamunde Pilcher was the same age, but maintained that the character was not her.
Based on her childhood memories of Cornwall and London, the book became a bestseller in America and was adapted into a television film. By 1994, one newspaper calculated she was one of the top 10 richest women in Britain.
The secret of the book’s success, she believed, was that it appealed to women with the leisure to read.
After The Shell Seekers, Mrs Pilcher wrote September, Coming Home and Winter Solstice. By then, she had been writing for 60 years.
Mrs Pilcher had a street named for her in her home village of Longforgan and was made an OBE in 2002.
Her husband died in 2009 and she is survived by two sons, two daughters, 14 grandchildren and 17 great grandchildren.
Based on her childhood memories of Cornwall and London, the book became a bestseller in America and was adapted into a television film
As goals go, the ability to bring joy to millions takes some beating but that was the feat accomplished by Rosamunde Pilcher, who has died aged 94.
The bestselling novelist will be fondly remembered for The Shell Seekers, which sold more than five million copies worldwide. She was made an OBE and has a street named after her in Longforgan, where she made her home.
However, it was her warm, insightful appreciation of family life that touched the hearts of readers everywhere – and means her legacy will live on for many years to come.