Rosamunde E. M. L. Pilcher, OBE (; 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 she was published under the pen name Jane Fraser.
Early and personal life
She was born Rosamunde Scott on 22 September 1924 in Lelant, Cornwall. Her parents were Helen () and Charles Scott, a British civil servant. She attended the School of St. Clare in Penzance and Howell's School Llandaff before going on to Miss Kerr-Sanders' Secretarial College. She began writing when she was seven, and published her first short story when she was 18. 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)