Rosamunde Pilcher

Rosamunde Evelina Montague Laurence Pilcher (; 22 September 1924 – 6 February 2019) was a British novelist, best known for her sweeping novels set in Cornwall. Her books have sold over 60 million copies worldwide. Early in her career her work was published under the pen name of Jane Fraser.

Early and personal life Born on 22 September 1924 in Lelant, Cornwall, Pilcher began life as Rosamunde Scott, a daughter of Helen and Charles Scott, a British civil servant. She began writing when she was seven During the Second World War, she joined the Women's Royal Naval Service and spent two years at the Whale Island Royal Gunnery School, from where she was posted to Trincomalee in Ceylon. There, aged 19, after many rejections, she sold a short story to Woman & Home magazine for 15 guineas. They moved to Dundee, Scotland. They had two daughters and two sons.

Pilcher died on 6 February 2019, at the age of 94, following a stroke. 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." The novel describes the everyday details of what life during World War II was like for some of those who lived in Britain. Pilcher was said to be among the highest-earning women in Britain by the mid-1990s.

Her other major novels include September (1990), Coming Home (1995) and Winter Solstice (2000). Coming Home won the Romantic Novel of the Year Award by Romantic Novelists' Association in 1996. 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". That same year she was awarded the British Tourism Award for the positive effect the books and the adaptations have had on Cornish tourism. Notable film locations include Prideaux Place, a 16th-century mansion near Padstow. The Brown Fields (1951) Voices in Summer (1984) The Shell Seekers (1987) Flowers in the Rain: And Other Stories (1991) The Key (1996) A Place Like Home (2021)

Non-fiction

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