A Long Way From Home

Rosamunde Pilcher was born in west Cornwall in 1924. Her father, a civil servant, worked in Burma, so that her mother mostly raised Rosamunde and her sister alone. She later ascribed this solitary childhood to firing her fierce imagination. Having written stories all this time, she made her first short story sale aged just nineteen. This was her vocation, and she began producing novels under the penname of Jane Fraser for Mills and Boon. In her sixties she wrote The Shell Seekers, some of it loosely based on her own wartime experiences, which became a huge international bestseller, particularly in America and Germany – a country that has now made over 100 TV films of her stories. Pilcher has been described as an ‘unromantic’ romantic novelist, adding both grit and realism to tales that are strongly tied to their locations in time and place, particularly her beloved Cornwall. She died in 2019, aged 94.