Her first eight novels under the pseudonym Jane Fraser each “had five cliff-hangers for a six-part magazine serial” and were published by Mills & Boon. Her writing gave her independence, both spiritually and financially.įrom the start she was a pro. The war, and the many young people she had met in her travels, provided limitless subject matter. She once told me that she often worked out dialogue while hanging washing on the line. Photograph: Martin Argles/The Guardianīut always she kept writing.
I had walked round the fields talking to all my people for so long and suddenly it was all over. I was terribly bereft when I finished it. “Everything I love was in that book,” Pilcher said: “Bohemian people, painters, paintings, Cornwall, the way London used to be. One reviewer wrote: “Penelope could win any number of ‘unforgettable character’ competitions.” It is also a world peopled with characters that stick with you. Sex is strictly between the lines shopping means getting in the groceries.” As one US critic wrote of her last novel, Winter Solstice (2000): “We are back among the reliable sights and sounds of Pilcherdom: a world of strong women, well-mannered men, bracing landscapes, big dogs, loyal cleaning ladies and houses that smell of wax polish …. A long, difficult job and both partners have to work harder than ever before.” Siv said she had never in her life known such a direct person.Ī Pilcher novel is instantly recognisable. Pilcher wrote to her German editor, Siv Bublitz: “Marriage is like a job. They explore themes of family, love and loss, and of life’s upheavals, but with a grittiness and fearless observation that set a benchmark for many younger novelists.
Her novels and short stories have a brilliant feeling for the texture of a place and people’s relationship to it. Pilcher, who has died aged 94, wrote completely absorbing page-turners, taking what was called “romantic fiction” to an altogether higher, wittier level. When The Shell Seekers was published in New York in 1988 it became an immediate bestseller
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