Introduction
By Lucinda Riley
When I was asked by Kate Howard at Hodder & Stoughton to write an introduction to a book of short stories by Rosamunde Pilcher, I felt immediately emotional. It took me back to a moment in my late teens when, like so many women in the UK and the wider world, I read The Shell Seekers.
It was a ground-breaking novel, in that it elevated the usual romance books we all read then to a deeper and more realistic level, introducing us to a not-so-perfect heroine and her often troubled family. It focuses on an older woman, no longer in the full bloom of beauty and youth, who reflects back on her life, with Pilcher’s trademark vivid descriptions of her beloved Cornwall, where she grew up. Yet this was not a ‘literary’ book, but hugely accessible to all who turned its pages eagerly to discover what would happen. It was a wonderful story that was equally beautifully written, with memorable characters I can still remember to this day. In short, The Shell Seekers helped pave the way for many of us female novelists to write books that included ‘romance’, but gave a far more gritty and accurate portrayal of women living in the late twentieth century. As a young, aspiring writer myself, Rosamunde Pilcher and The Shell Seekers became my inspiration.
Like me, Rosamunde did not become an overnight success. She sold her first short story at nineteen whilst she was in the WRNS during the war, and in 1949 she published her first novel with Mills & Boon under ‘Jane Fraser’, a pseudonym she kept for ten novels before she began using her own name on all her books in 1965. It would take her another twenty years and twenty-two novels before she achieved worldwide fame with The Shell Seekers at the age of almost sixty.
Outside writing, Rosamunde had a long and happy marriage which produced four children. As her son Robin told me, in an era when it was still acceptable that children were ‘seen and not heard’, she always had time for hers. Many of Robin’s friends who came to play would say that they wished she was their mother which, as a working mother of four myself, is perhaps the ultimate compliment.
Over the years, Rosamunde also wrote a number of short stories for women’s magazines, some of which have already been published in collections such as The Blue Bedroom and Flowers in the Rain. After she sadly died in 2019, other short stories that had never been collated or published in book form were discovered at the British Library by Aoife Inman, an intrepid young assistant at the Felicity Bryan Associates literary agency, who spent days searching through old folios of magazines for stories Rosamunde had written, most of them between 1976 and 1984. Some of these are included in this new edition.
As with every Rosamunde Pilcher story – long or short – I began to read them and couldn’t stop. And as always, it took no more than a few pages before I came across one of her prosaic sentences: ‘Loving a person … is not finding perfection, but forgiving faults.’ Rosamunde had the unique gift of being able to sum up the essence of some of life’s big questions in just a few wise words.
To those of you who already know and love Rosamunde’s writing, these short stories will be a welcome pleasure, and for those readers that don’t, they are a wonderful introduction to her talent as a storyteller and the fictional worlds she so effortlessly brought to life. Just as some of our most famous female novelists, such as Austen and the Brontë sisters, have stood the test of time, I believe that Rosamunde Pilcher’s stories, all written in the twentieth century, will do the same – simply because she wrote so eloquently about universal themes that resonate with all women, whatever age they may live in.
Lucinda Riley
September 2020
Someone to Trust
When it was all over, when she had turned her back on him and walked away, leaving him standing on the pavement, staring after her, she had gone back to the office, stumbled through an afternoon’s work, somehow got herself back to the flat, and then rung Sally.
The numbers slotted into place at last. She heard the double ring of Sally’s telephone, far away in the uttermost reaches of Devon. She prayed, Let her be in, please let her be in.
‘Hello!’ Sally’s voice, marvellously close and clear. All at once Rachael felt better. She smiled, as though Sally could see her face, hoping that the smile would somehow get through to her voice.
‘Sally, it’s me, Rachael.’
‘Darling! How are you?’
‘I’m fine. How about you?’
‘Fairly desolate. Andrew’s gone off for an unspecified period in his submarine. Probably crawling along under some terrifying ice cap or other.’
‘Would you like a little company?’
‘Adore it, if it was yours.’
‘I thought maybe a couple of weeks?’
‘I can’t believe it! You mean, you can really get away from London for a couple of weeks? What about the job?’
‘I’m tired of jobs. I’m giving in my notice tomorrow. Anyway, it was only on a sort of temporary basis. And there’s another girl who can take my room in the flat for the time being.’
‘Oh, you couldn’t have told me anything I wanted to hear more. When will you be here?’
‘Next Friday week, if that’s not too soon.’
‘I’ll meet you off the train. Darling …’ Sally hesitated. ‘It’s frightfully boring. I mean, nothing but me and scenery, and I’m at the shop all day.’
‘That’s just what I need.’
There was another little pause, and then Sally said, ‘Nothing wrong?’
Copyright © 2021 by The Literary Estate of Rosamunde Pilcher.
