Old Lady Books Club Episode #001

It’s January pals and that means the Old Lady Books Club is GO! (Comment here to ‘sign up’! It’s free and easy!)

Some of you may not have your books yet, due to the end-of-year post situation. Fret not. We have TWO months to acquire and read Winter Solstice by Rosamunde Pilcher. During the two months I will be sharing a discussion post, a craft post, and a recipe post … all themed around the book. Then we will have a final discussion at the end of February (though I am still deciding on the best platform/way to do that so that it’s as inclusive as possible.) Pencil Friday 28th Feb in! It’ll be something online and forum-y. So everyone can dip in at a suitable time across the globe. I will also endeavour to record a video (possibly a LIVE). Let’s see how I go, though?!

Also if you are still tracking down the book – Winter Solstice by Rosamunde Pilcher – don’t forget to check your library or eLibrary for the book if you haven’t got a physical copy. You can often join other libraries (ones not near to you) online in your city. Perhaps do that and borrow the eBook or audiobook version if they have it? I see this book at op shops very often, too. Or grab a second hand copy on eBay or similar. Or a new copy via your fave bookseller.

Now, let’s talk a little bit about the author of Winter Solstice, Rosamunde Pilcher …

A little bit about Rosamunde Pilcher

Mrs Pilcher was born Rosamunde Scott in Cornwall in 1924, the daughter of Charles, an often absent Indian Civil Service-employed father and Helen, the mother who raised her. Rosamunde began writing when she was just seven, attending St. Clare’s Polwithen and then Howell’s School Llandaff followed by Miss Kerr-Sanders’ Secretarial College [via]. On leaving college, Rosamunde used her newly acquired shorthand skills to secure a job in the Foreign Office, pretty much following in the footsteps of her father.

In 1944 Rosamunde joined the WRENS (Women’s Royal Navy Service) and was soon stationed in Sri Lanka. During this period, Rosamunde’s dad submitted one of her short stories to Women and Home magazine and it was promptly published scoring 15 guineas for the up-and-coming author. Extracted fiction and short stories were hugely popular magazine features during the mid-century and this signalled the beginning of Rosamunde’s soon to be huge writing career.

By 1945 she was married to Graham Pilcher and had moved to Dundee, Scotland to begin writing full-time. She had no end of material to draw on, thanks to her very busy earlier years.

“Because I had spent a long time meeting with and living with so many young people in Portsmouth and Ceylon [now Sri Lanka], I’d seen countless love affairs starting, blossoming, crashing and ending,” the Marlboro-smoking Rosamunde explained [via New York Times.]  “There were dozens of different characters stored in my memory, and these formed the basis of these stories.” 

The Times reported that she said she’d had “hundreds and hundreds” of boyfriends prior to Graham, but never slept with them. “Invited by a mutual friend to tea, Graham swiftly decided that Rosamunde ‘had the prettiest legs I’d ever seen’. Pilcher later described him as her ‘rock’.” [via]

Rosamunde (known adorably as ‘Dondie’ to her grandchildren) and Graham had five children together: daughters Amanda (who sadly died as a baby), Fiona and Philippa and sons Robin (now also an author) and Mark. And Rosamunde, keen to pursue professional writing as a career since her school days, wrote on. And on. And ON.

“I made friends with a lovely lady in London who was a magazine editor. Awfully nice woman, she was,” Rosamunde told The People’s Friend. “She said you haven’t quite got the knack, yet, but send me everything that you write. Which was like having your own agent!”

A series of titles with Mills & Boon followed, and Rosamunde made the most of this secure but constrained partnership for nine years, basically learning her trade.

“You could do this and that, but not the other. But it was working and being paid for – it was a beginning. I liked working with them. They were very straight,” she said.

These first novels were written under the pen name Jane Fraser. However by 1955, she was publishing her now much more accomplished work under her married name Rosamunde Pilcher.

American publisher St Martin’s Press soon snapped her up, exposing her writing to a wider and much more lucrative US audience. Editor Tom Dunne helped her map out the plot of the millions-selling The Shell Seekers, a novel that took two years to complete, and the rest is best selling history. (It’s sold upwards of 10 million copies.)

Katie Fforde, then-president of the Romantic Novelists’ Association from 2011-2023, told The Guardian that “Rosamunde Pilcher was groundbreaking as she was the first to bring family sagas to the wider public. Houses full of secrets, families full of lies, beautiful settings, page-turning plots.”

Celebrated for her canny dialogue, Pilcher once told an interviewer from People Magazine that “I always practice my dialogue out loud. Once, when Fiona was small, she had a friend over, and I was hanging up the washing and running through my dialogue. Her friend said, ‘Look, your mummy’s lips are moving.’ And Fiona said: ‘Don’t be stupid. She’s writing.’ ” [via]

Of course, because Pilcher’s work details women’s lives and domestic spaces, it’s often discounted by critics, deemed somehow less legitimate than some other fictional genres. We know, however, that stories of women’s lives, the capturing of domestic spaces, is historically, sociologically and politically valuable. So let’s discount those critics, shall we? Except for Rosmunde who did herself once describe her (very early M&B) books as “frightfully wet” because she really did hit her stride after 60 and perhaps felt those early works were more of a training ground?  

Plenty of ‘establishment’ critics did admire Rosamunde’s work. The New York Times’ Martin Levim, for instance, who wrote of Pilcher’s 1974 novel Another View: “I don’t know where Rosamunde Pilcher has been all my life—but now that I’ve found her, I’m not going to let her go. The reason being that she writes romantic novels that are nearly perfect little bonbons: not too much sugar, very little artificial coloring, lots of natural at ingredients, ingeniously blended.”

As Rosamunde’s literary agent, Felicity Bryan recounts, other critics have said of The Shell Seekers: “Penelope [lead protagonist] could win any number of ‘unforgettable character’ competitions” and of Winter Solstice: “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 …. Sex is strictly between the lines; shopping means getting in the groceries.”

Especially notable Pilcher titles include September, Coming Home (which won the Romantic Novel of the Year Award by Romantic Novelists’ Association in 1996) and – of course – her final novel, Winter Solstice. Peep a list of her books – in order of writing – here, including The World of Rosamunde Pilcher, a sort of guide book to being Rosamundy (there’s a doco, too!) 

Some of her most popular titles have been adapted for television/film with varying degrees of success. The Shell Seekers, for instance, is a 1989 feature film starring Angela Lansbury (it’s not great, though, when compared with the novel … but what is?) A TV mini-series of the same book looks a titch better. Coming Home is better, adapted via a two-part TV series and starring Joanna Lumley and a young Keira Knightley. Winter Solstice is also a made-for-TV adaptation. (I haven’t seen it, though.)

Graham Pilcher died in 2009 and Rosamunde followed a decade later in 2019 aged 94. Her work is still in print and still selling, and her home town of Cornwall still celebrates their famous daughter via an impressive number of Ros-themed  literary tours, cycling routes and scenic walks. There’s also a Winter Solstice-themed tour – based around Inverness, Scotland –  for those keen on the full Elfrida Phipps experience. (It honestly sounds amazing!)

Join in

At this point in our Old Lady Books Club, we are all reading or soon to start reading. Note the ‘deadline’ is February 28th, but there is leeway and you can join in our activities/discussion whether you have finished, nearly finished, not finished or are yet to begin. This is a very inclusive and loose sort of club.

Feel free to drop any general chatter/observations/feedback below about this post, Rosamunde, the book, grandmother ‘nicknames’ like Dondie, fiction snobbery, having hundreds and hundreds of boyfriends etc.

I will be back with a Winter Solstice-themed recipe in a week or two. And a craft project after that. And the our final discussion. In between I will be blogging as usual, as I can, just about my very quiet life … you know?

Hope that’s all a-okay!

Pip xx