She announced her retirement at the age of 80, with her final novel, Winter Solstice, topping charts on both sides of the Atlantic. Pilcher followed The Shell Seekers with bestsellers including Coming Home and September, both of which were filmed for television. She was so much fun, and a much-loved friend.” The warmth and humanity of her writing was matched only by the warmth and humanity of her personality. “She was in her nineties, but I think the world is a poorer place without her,” said Sue Fletcher, Pilcher’s editor at Hodder. “With The Shell Seekers she changed the face of romantic fiction.” Houses full of secrets, families full of lies, beautiful settings, page-turning plots,” said novelist Katie Fforde, who is president of the Romantic Novelists’ Association. “Rosamunde Pilcher was groundbreaking as she was the first to bring family sagas to the wider public. Selling more than 10m copies, it was adapted for television starring Vanessa Redgrave, and was voted one of Britain’s favourite novels in the BBC’s Big Read in 2003. Pilcher’s 14th novel, written when the author was 63, it was published in 1987 and spent 49 weeks in the New York Times bestseller lists. Set between Cornwall and London, and moving from the second world war to the 1980s, Pilcher’s best-known novel, The Shell Seekers, told the story of an artist’s elderly daughter, Penelope Keeling, who discovers that her father’s painting is worth a small fortune. She was called that by grandchildren, great-grandchildren and all their friends. He thought that when she said ‘going to Dundee’, it meant seeing his grandmother, so he called her Dondie. “When my eldest son was young, my wife would always drop in on my mother on her way to Dundee. Robin described Pilcher as “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”.
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