Rosamunde Pilcher, author of The Shell Seekers, dies at 94
ROMANTIC novelist Rosamunde Pilcher has died at 94.
The writer – who sold 60million books after an apprenticeship with Mills and Boon – was last night hailed for changing the face of romantic fiction with her 1987 family saga The Shell Seekers.
That best-seller, which alone shifted 10million copies, focuses on the tribulations of a Cornish family – and is so popular in Germany in particular that it has been credited with generating £50million a year for Cornwall’s tourism industry.
Mrs Pilcher has even been called ‘the person who has managed to do more than any to mend the relationships between the German and British peoples’.
Her personal prescription for romantic happiness, meanwhile, was a surprise – she said she and her late war hero husband Graham had largely led separate lives. He died in 2009 after 63 years of marriage.
She died at her home near Dundee on Wednesday, leaving two sons, two daughters, and 14 grandchildren. Her son Robin Pilcher, who became an author himself, yesterday confirmed her death saying: ‘She had been in great form up until Christmas, then suffered from bronchitis in the new year, but was always expected to bounce back as before. However, she suffered a stroke on Sunday night and never regained consciousness.’
He said that his mother had been ‘a wonderful, rather alternative-thinking mother – I think she might have liked the description Bohemian – who touched and influenced the lives of many of all ages, not only through her writing but through personal friendships’. He had said previously that ‘in my mother’s books, sex has always stopped at the bedroom door’.
The president of the Romantic Novelists Association, writer Katie Fforde, mourned the death of the woman who created pageturners about ‘ houses full of secrets, families full of lies’, saying: ‘With The Shell Seekers she changed the face of romantic fiction’. Mrs Pilcher’s publisher Jamie Hodder Williams, of Hodder & Stoughton, said she was a ‘one- off’, adding: ‘ In Germany she was such a star that they arranged Ros Pilcher holiday tours to Cornwall, where much of her work was set.’
Mrs Pilcher was born in Lelant on the north Cornish coast, a daughter of the colonial classes. Her father was absent, in the Royal Navy, and later for years in Burma, and her mother was a Christian Scientist.
The future novelist – said to occupy ‘ that undervalued middle ground between light fiction and serious literature’ – was a keen writer as a child, and had her first story published while still a teenager, earning £15.
In the Second World War she served for three years as a Royal Navy Wren based in Sri Lanka and working on a submarine supply ship. Recalling that time, she once said: ‘I was only 18, a secretary with no aspirations to become an officer and remarkably happy.’
Upon returning home to Cornwall, she bumped into Major Graham Hope Pilcher, eight years her senior and in the county to visit his grandmother. He fell for Pilcher instantly, recalling later ‘she had the prettiest legs I’d ever seen’.
He had been in the Black Watch and had won a Military Cross for an attack on a German sniper’s nest, but had left the service with a serious shelling injury to his abdomen that initially left him needing a colostomy bag.
The newlyweds – whose third daughter died aged five days old – moved together to Scotland, and he managed a jute business while she used her spare moments from motherhood typing stories on her kitchen table. Her first story had been published when she was still a Wren – ‘a wonderful moment’ – and from the 1940s under the pen name Jane Fraser, she began writing for Mills & Boon, but later dismissed those first ten early novels as ‘frightfully wet little novels – romantic stuff with red roses on the cover’. But Mrs Pilcher’s big breakthrough with The Shell Seekers only came when she was aged 63 – with other popular books including September and Coming Home following – after she switched from a British to an American publisher, who encouraged her to write more autobiographically.
Her books’ huge success in Germany, Austria and Switzerland have led to decades of German Sunday night TV serialisations, with viewers loving the ingredients of ‘sheep, sea, rough shorelines and a posh house’, and many flocking to Cornwall to see where the books are set.
Bemused Mrs Pilcher, who continued to dress in Marks and Spencer clothes despite the millions she earned in her later years, said of her continental celebrity: ‘In my local supermarket in Dundee – someone might come up occasionally and say she liked a book, but when I go to Berlin I get hugged on the street!’
Mrs Pilcher, who received an OBe in 2002, said of her novels’ appeal: ‘The mother doesn’t mind handing my books over to her daughter because they’re not full of sex, drugs and shopping.’ Referring to her lack of appeal to literary snobs, she commented: ‘I’m like Liberace – laughing all the way to the bank. If you sat around waiting for the critics to praise you, you’d never do anything.’
‘Change face of romantic fiction’