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Rosamunde Pilcher
Rosamunde Pilcher, nee Scott, was born in Lelant, Cornwall, on 22 September
1924. She was educated at St. Clare's Polwithen and Howell's School Llandaff,
then at Miss Kerr-Sanders' Secretarial College. She did military service with
the Women's Royal Naval Service 1943-46, and married Graham Hope Pilcher in
1946. They have two daughters and two sons.
Pilcher began her writing career in 1949 as an author of Mills and Boon
romances, under the name Jane Fraser. She published ten such novels, the last
("The Keeper's House") in 1963. Between 1955 and 1957 she also wrote three
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plays
(two co-written with Charles C. Gairdner), one of which The Dashing White
Sergeant was produced in London in 1955 (the other plays are The Piper of
Orde and The Tulip Major). Her first novel as Rosamunde Pilcher, A Secret To
Tell, was published in the same year, and there are two other Pilcher novels
(April and On My Own) up to 1965, when she began exclusively using her own
name.
Rosamunde's international reputation was secured by The Shell Seekers (1987),
of which she has said (in the New York Times Book Review) that if she'd died the
day after writing it, everyone would know exactly what happened in her own life.
She has also said (in Publisher's Weekly), "I don't ever write about a place or
a person or an experience that I don't know a lot about." Cornwall, where she
was born, and Scotland, where she has lived for many years (in Invergowrie,
Dundee), therefore figure largely in Pilcher's work. She has published two short
story collections: The Blue Bedroom (1985), Flowers In The Rain (1991),
and says her stories are "not so much love stories, but more about human
relations... If the stories do not have a happy ending, then they always have a
hopeful ending."
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