Literary Birthday – 22 September – Rosamunde Pilcher

Rosamunde Pilcher was born on 22 September 1924 and died on 6 February 2019.

Rosamunde Pilcher Quotes

1. In Germany, I have been called the Queen of Kitsch, but I don’t mind that – as long as people buy the books.
2. You don’t stop doing things because you get old. You get old because you stop doing things.
3. Other people’s houses were always fascinating. As soon as you went through the door for the first time, you got the feel of the atmosphere, and so discovered something about the personalities of the people who lived there.
4. Writing is work, but it’s also a compulsion, and once you get your characters on paper, you can’t abandon them. You have to respond to them.
5. It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive. Arrival often brings nothing but a sense of desolation and disappointment.
6. My style was developed and shaped by the available market. Having said that I do think the romantic genre is too narrow. I feel, with my later novels especially, that I fall into the category of relationships rather than romance.
7. There is no magic in all the world like that magic when you sell your first bit of writing.

Rosamunde Pilcher was a British author of romance novels and mainstream women’s fiction, best known for her sweeping novels set in Cornwall. 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. Other titles include September and Coming Home, which won the Romantic Novel of the Year Award by Romantic Novelists’ Association in 1996. Her novels sold over 60 million copies worldwide. In the 2002 New Year Honours, she was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to literature.

Source for image: Penguin UK

by Amanda Patterson
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