The Shell Seekers sold around ten million copies and was translated into more than forty languages.

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. It focuses on an elderly British woman, Penelope Keeling, who relives her life in flashbacks, and on her relationship with her adult children. The breakthrough in Pilcher's career came in 1987, when she wrote the family saga The Shell Seekers, her fourteenth novel under her own name. By 1965 she had dropped the pseudonym and was signing her own name to all of her novels. In 1955, she also began writing under her real name with Secret to Tell. She published a further ten novels under that name. In 1949, Pilcher's first book, a romance novel, was published by Mills and Boon, under the pseudonym Jane Fraser. Pilcher died on 6 February 2019, at the age of 94, following a stroke. Her son, Robin Pilcher, is also a novelist. On 7 December 1946, she married Graham Hope Pilcher, a war hero and jute industry executive who died in March 2009. įrom 1943 until 1946, Pilcher served with the Women's Royal Naval Service. She began writing when she was seven, and published her first short story when she was 15. Clare in Penzance and Howell's School Llandaff before going on to Miss Kerr-Sanders' Secretarial College.

Just before her birth her father was posted in Burma, while her mother remained in England. Her parents were Helen ( née Harvey) and Charles Scott, a British civil servant. She was born Rosamunde Scott on 22 September 1924 in Lelant, Cornwall. In 2001, she received the Corine Literature Prize's Weltbild Readers' Prize for Winter Solstice. Early in her career she was also published under the pen name Jane Fraser. Her novels sold over 60 million copies worldwide.

Rosamunde Pilcher, OBE ( née Scott 22 September 1924 – 6 February 2019) was a British writer of romance novels, mainstream fiction, and short stories, from 1949 until her retirement in 2000.

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