Rosamunde Pilcher’s Perthshire & Kinross
02/21/03

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Q: How long have you lived and worked in Perthshire?

A: I have lived in Perthshire for nearly 57 years, and been working writing and selling fiction for just about as long a time.

Q: Describe the region to someone who has never visited it.

A: Between Dundee and Perth lie the rich arable farmlands of this district. To the south the River Tay flows east towards the sea. Wild geese feed on the marshy foreshores and, at morning and evening, skeins of these lovely birds fly overhead, travelling from the remote lochs hidden in the Sidlaw Hills.

Q: What are the area’s main attractions?

A: The ease with which one can leave the city behind, and be in deep countryside in no time; and the many championship golf courses that are close at hand.

Q: What are the area’s strongest points, and its weakest points?

A: The area’s strongest point is the location. Near the sea, so that there are always fresh winds, and not far from leisure locations – hills to walk, rivers to fish, golf courses and skiing in the winter months. A huge minus is the lack of good restaurants, hotels and pubs. If we have friends staying we never eat out but always at home.

Q: Describe an ideal day out spent in Perthshire.

A: I would go up to Glenmarkie, where, in l900, my husband’s grandfather built a shooting lodge. The house has been sold on, two or three times, but it lies at the head of a seven-mile glen, surrounded by quiet hills which used to ring to the ‘go-back, go-back’ of grouse. In the neighbouring glen, the grandfather dammed a burn and created a peaceful loch. Sheep graze by its reedy banks and many a picnic was enjoyed, with swimming and trips in the rowing boat and rounders or cricket matches on the flat, grazed grass meadows.

Q: Does the region influence your writing in any way?

A: I have used many locations in my novels, not necessarily being totally accurate, but mixing favourite features. A house there, a hill here … a river, a garden.

Q: Who are your Scottish heroes, both historical and modern?

A: I am not a great history person, so my Scottish heroes tend to be the inventors: Baird and Fleming and Dunlop. I also admire deeply the work of Scottish artists, from Wilkie to the Glasgow boys and the Scottish School. And if I had a million to spare, what joy to be the possessor of one of Peploe’s still lifes, and to be able to look at it every single day.

Q: Is there anything you would change about the area?

A: The Scottish Parliament is what I would most like to change. A narrow-minded, urban parliament is not what a rural country like Scotland needs. What do the representatives from Motherwell, Paisley and Renfrew know about the problems of the Sutherland tanner, the Fraserburgh fisherman? We are not a big enough country to range ourselves in enmity. ‘Them versus Us’ is outdated. Something has to change. Perhaps an attitude?

Rosamunde Pilcher, Perthshire-based author of novels such as Coming Home and Winter Solstice, has been writing all her life, with best-selling success. The above novels are published by Hodder and Stoughton.

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1. The author starts her day with tea and marmalade
toast at the lovingly laid breakfast table

2. A place for leisure hours: RP likes
to sit in this flowered chair.

3. RP doesn´t think much of modern technics
- a computer - she writes all her stories
on an electric typewriter.

4. In the evening the Pilcher's like to have a whisky at the fireplace.

5. "Hot-water bottles are the best
invention" RP says. It belongs to her
night rituals like combing and brushing teeth.

6. Graham Pilcher is a real gentleman. He changes before
dinner and appears always in a suit.
At the moment he is recovering from a hip
operation. But soon he wants to play golf again.

TBR: One of the most appealing aspects of your new book, WINTER SOLSTICE, lies in the characterizations, especially Elfrida Phipps and Oscar Blundell, both of whom are retirement age. Did you start out intending to write a story that would incorporate some of the more poignant difficulties of aging, or did that evolve some time later?

RP: No, I started out writing about two mature people, both of whom had come through tragic times, finding companionship and a new love with each other.

TBR: WINTER SOLSTICE encompasses so many emotional facets. The most prevalent is the loneliness that many of your characters experience, in particular those who have lost a spouse. Elfrida laments, "Perhaps that was the worst of all. Not having someone to remember things with." Is the absence of that special companionship that couples share the most painful type of loneliness? Do human beings have a need to be partnered to be truly happy?

RP: I don't think people need a partner to be truly happy. A self resourceful person can lead a full and happy life without a companion...simply friends. But for Elfrida, it was different --- and she missed her lover and wanted someone to remember good days with.

TBR: Was it their desperate need for companionship that ultimately drew Elfrida and Oscar together or would they have fallen in love under different circumstances anyway?

RP: I think Elfrida and Oscar were twin souls. Their relationship from the very beginning was one of recognized compatibility, despite the fact that he was married to Gloria.

TBR: Even though Gloria Blundell was a heavy drinker and had been drinking the night of the accident, Oscar never seems to hold her responsible for the death of their child. Wouldn't most people in that situation tend to feel just the opposite?

RP: Oscar never blamed Gloria for the accident. Simply himself, for not having the foresight to drive both wife and daughter to the firework party.

TBR: Elfrida was such a dichotomy of moralistic values. On the one hand, she'd been living with a man while he was estranged from his wife, and had encouraged her cousin Jeffrey to leave his unhappy marriage with Dodie and marry Serena, yet she abhorred the idea of a woman stealing another woman's husband. Isn't this a rather fine line of distinction?

RP: Elfrida's moral code was fairly flexible. ALL she disapproved of was the single woman, divorced or widowed, taken under the kindly wing of a good girlfriend, and then scarpering with the kindly girlfriend's husband. This was the situation in which she found herself, and she was to have no part in it.

TBR: Another central feature of WINTER SOLSTICE is the focus on family relationships --- husband/wife, mother/daugher, father/daughter, sister to sister. Dodie's daughters, Nicole and Carrie, have both suffered from a lack of nurturing, and Nicole is carrying on the tradition by treating her own daughter as an inconvenience. The implication is that Dodie's personality is the root of this dysfunctional family; Jeffrey seems to be viewed as blameless. Isn't his emotional absence in his daughters' and granddaughter's lives a contributing factor?

RP: Dodie's personality IS the root of her dysfunctional family. She is bone selfish and always has been. Jeffrey, not blameless, has nevertheless done his best, cared for his wife and children, and seen the children on their way. His wife, divorced, is well off and independent. As for him, I think he deserves a little happiness with Serena, at the end of it all.

TBR: Village life in rural England and Scotland is portrayed as one of community involvement, sharing responsibilities and caring for those in need. Even the elderly employees of the now defunct estate were watched over by local residents. In fact, one resident comments that if Oscar returned to his hometown after a 50 year absence he'd be welcome with open arms. We seldom see that kind of kindred, neighborly spirit today. Is our more mobile society impacting our sense of belonging to a community?

RP: I think in Scotland, where life jogs along at a slower pace, people do stay and live in small communities and take care of each other. All the inhabitants of Creagan would have remembered old Mrs. McLellan, the "doyenne" of the Big House, with much affection and respect. Her grandson would automatically have been welcomed back into the fold for her sake.

TBR: Elfrida and Oscar were concerned that their "living arrangements" would appear scandalous in the eyes of the local residents as well as her family, yet no one seemed the least bit offended by it, not even the minister and his wife. Was it because of their age or a reflection of more relaxed social morès?

RP: Life and moral values move on and change. Elfrida and Oscar's design for living would have been of no concern to any person provided they fit in, were friendly, and became part of the community, which they did. Oscar was also the grandson of old Mrs. McLellan, which would automatically give him carte blanche. The Minister, Peter Kennedy, is a wise man, and would be nothing but benevolent. He recognizes a truly good man when he sees one.

TBR: Despite her lack of a stable home life, Lucy appeared to be quite well-adjusted and resilient. She exhibited many personality traits of a typical teenager --- except perhaps her willingness to tackle household chores. Does this suggest that those born with a survivalist nature will endure despite the quality of parenting? Or does it require some positive influence from another source to ensure their success?

RP: Lucy is perhaps a little old-fashioned and biddable. She is not a modern, self assertive child. Such children still exist. She is simply looking for a bit of colour, companionship, and love in her rather boring life. A normality which she knows she is missing out on.

TBR: At one point, you alluded to the origins of the celebration of the Winter Solstice? Can you elaborate any on the history behind this?

RP: Winter Solstice, really nothing more to say.

TBR: Your descriptions of the deterioration of many local estates painted such a tragic picture. Are there actually a great many old estates crumbling and neglected in areas of Scotland? If so, couldn't they be put to some useful purpose while preserving them as much as possible?

RP: Yes, large estates do go downhill. Many of them were built and the land farmed and used for sport during the rich Victorian years, when labour was cheap, workmanship excellent, and a whole different sense of values existed. They could be put to some useful purpose, except that they are isolated and often situated in countryside which cannot be used for anything agricultural. That was part of their charm. It is hard to find a useful life for them, and the families who inherit them either take in paying guests, let out the shooting and fishing, or turn them into historical tours. Dubrobin, the home of the Duke of Sutherland, is typical. A historical tour, while the Lord Strathnaver lives in a converted dairy.

TBR: When you write a novel like WINTER SOLSTICE, do you begin with an outline of a story in mind, or do you create the characters and work outward as they develop?

RP: I started WINTER SOLSTICE with five characters. The story is what becomes of them.

TBR: With such a long career in writing, do you have any sage advice for budding authors out there?

RP: Budding authors, be self-disciplined. It is a lonely job. And LISTEN to experts.

TBR: What authors influenced you when you began your writing career? Who do you enjoy reading for pleasure today?

RP: I read my first Monica Dickens, called MARIANA, when I was about twelve. From her I learned a great deal about writing novels.

TBR: Will it be another 5 years before we see another Rosamunde Pilcher novel, or do you already have something cooking?

RP: I have no new book cooking. At my mature age, I shall probably not write another novel, but we shall see. back to top

"ELFRIDA, with a basket in her hand and Horace firmly clipped to the end of his lead, closed the front door of her cottage behind her, walked down the narrow path, through the gate, and set off down the pavement towards the Post Office and General Store . . ."

December 1946: Graham and Rosamunde on their wedding day

These unsensational words will quicken the pulse of Rosamunde Pilcher fans across the globe. They announce that the long winter of her abstention from romantic fiction is over. Five years ago, the author of The Shell Seekers and Coming Home said she had written her last book, honoured her contracts and intended to spend more time with her family and friends. She was 71 and had made a fortune. There was no reason to disbelieve her.

Suddenly, with the polite click of Elfrida Phipps's gate, 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.

Pilcher's books are about coping with life's upheavals. Sex is strictly between the lines; shopping means getting in the groceries. Whatever the traumas of the previous night - and there are few crises that cannot be met by a large whisky - her characters can look forward to the restorative smell of bacon sizzling on the Aga for breakfast and an endless supply of scalding coffee.

"I am terribly uninterested in shopping," says Pilcher, smokily, "but I think sex and money are two of life's great enhancers. They make life magic. They make the sky blue and the sun shine and everything wonderful. But once you start writing about them, unless you do it quite beautifully, they become very b-o-r-i-n-g. I won't say 'offensive' because I'm not offended, but in so many books they drag sex in by the legs and you want to turn the page because it's so boring. To write very intimately is a great art - and it must be romantic, not just physical."

In this department, she yields to the superior powers of Elizabeth Jane Howard, who "can write a really steamy sexual scene and it feels true . . . I think she is an enormously experienced lady".

Pilcher's strength is knowing what she can do well and writing about what she knows. She doesn't, frankly, give a damn about literary snobs or being called the queen of kitsch. With sales of 60 million from all her titles, why should she? "I am a bit like Liberace: laughing all the way to the bank," she says, reaching for another Marlboro. "You can't please everybody. If you sat around waiting for the critics to praise you, you'd never do anything. You've written the book. You just have to let the brickbats come."

Pilcher comfortably occupies that undervalued middle ground between light fiction and serious literature. There are flashes of the Mills and Boon writer she once was - as in the parodist's dream: "He took her into his arms and she leant against him, her shoulders heaving, weeping into the front of his Barbour" - but she has a way of tapping into the emotional life of her readers and making them care about characters not unlike themselves.

Her definition of her female constituency is recklessly honest. "Mostly, I would say, the older lady, or the family lady. The mother doesn't mind handing my books over to her daughter because they're not full of sex, drugs and shopping. Granny can hand them on to her granddaughter, her sister, her niece. Readers say things like: 'Your new book got me through a bad time when my husband was ill'. The Shell Seekers is still in print and selling like mad everywhere."

This was the book, based on her early memories of Cornwall and London, that toppled Tom Wolfe from number one in the New York Times bestseller list in 1990 and became the highest-selling paperback of the decade. It has sold 5.5 million copies worldwide and was made into a television film starring Angela Lansbury and Patricia Hodge. If for no other reason than that she sells, sells, sells, Pilcher has a huge claim on our attention.

Until Shell Seekers, she belonged to that industrious band of unknown women who tapped out saleable stories at the kitchen table while bringing up children, supporting the breadwinner and running the house. In the words of a friend who knew them way back, she was "the wife of Major Pilcher of the Black Watch, the beautiful woman of the home, writing her little books".

But Major Pilcher's wife was not happy at the way her little books were being treated. "They were being peddled as a very inferior imprint of the Collins publishing house," she says, acidly. "They looked trashy. They were sold in a trashy way. I said: 'Y'know, if you're not going to publish them with pride, don't publish them at all'." So she gathered up her titles and defected to St Martin's Press in America, selling all her English-speaking rights.

It was a smart move. "I don't know where Rosamunde Pilcher has been all my life," the New York Times reviewer crooned, "but now that I've found her, I'm not going to let her go." Americans were entranced by the boggy, heather-clad landscapes of her stories and her reassuring belief in the ability of humankind to cope with whatever life throws at it. She became big in Brazil and Scandinavia and a cult figure in Germany, where she is the bestselling post-war novelist.

It was her American editor, Tom Dunne, who persuaded her to try a longer, more autobiographical book. Entirely without hype, The Shell Seekers became a bestseller within three weeks. Pilcher is convinced that she owes a great debt to those "nice little ladies running dear little bookshops in the American suburbs" who spread the word that here was a safe, engrossing read.

"I don't think anything will have the impact Shell Seekers had. Everything I love was in that book: Bohemian people, painters, paintings, Cornwall, the way London used to be. I was terribly bereft when I finished it. I had walked round the fields talking to all my people for so long and suddenly it was all over. I had nobody to chat to any longer. They'd all gone."

As the cheques started to roll in, Pilcher was overwhelmed by an inexplicable feeling of doom. "I felt something ghastly was going to happen. It must have been a sudden awareness of responsibility. I knew I had to think ahead, plan for the future."

It isn't that they had previously lacked means. Graham Pilcher had been a director of the family jute business in Dundee. They lived in a big house surrounded by nice paintings and taken-for-granted antiques. There was a swimming pool, a tennis court, a paddock and several acres of grass. So paralyzed was she by the need to be sensible that her first, and for a long time her only, extravagance was to buy her husband a ride-on mower. It was six years before she partially renovated her kitchen and installed an Aga.

If anything, she began to scale down. With the four children off their hands, the Pilchers left the family home and moved to a ranch-style bungalow in the village of Longforgan, near Dundee. They even went for smaller dogs - long-haired dachshunds instead of labradors - a kinder solution than the one meted out to her antique furniture: she cuts the legs off stools and tables if the height isn't right.

There is a lingering frugality about Pilcher which probably stems from her family's genteel poverty and a reluctance to take anything for granted. She's sharp, savvy, kind - and nothing like as whimsical as readers who send her flowers and pictures of their homes would like to think.

"Nothing is ever said about money," she says. "I deliberately never talk about it. We never talk about anything beyond the two of us. If the papers say I'm rich, I just pass it off. It's nothing to do with them. It's nothing to do with anybody - not even our children, actually."

Graham Pilcher is 84 and many men of his generation would find it hard to be generous about a wife's sudden fame and fortune. But he is as genuinely delighted for her success, and the security it has given them in old age, as she is careful not to flaunt it.

"I would never dream of belittling all he did for us when we were young," she says. "He kept the family together, went off to work every day, earned a living, paid for the children's education. I wasn't earning enough to do anything like that. Now, if he wants to, he can go and buy himself a big new car, but he doesn't."

They're already well-travelled, Disneyland holds no appeal and they are far too busy to go on a cruise. As for clothes, you have only to glance at Mrs Pilcher's washing line to see where her priorities lie - three identical Marks & Spencer cardigans are pegged out in the sunshine.

When the shock of her success had sunk in, Pilcher bought a five-bedroom flat above the Victorian bank in Dornoch, Sutherland, where she could enjoy the sea air and her husband could play golf. But her defining gesture was to make over the profits and copyrights of her next two books to her children.

"Brilliant move," she says. "All I had to do was live for seven years. My chartered accountant suggested it. But the legal complications were tremendous. I had to have a special patents man from London. Because an unwritten book has no worth, it was like giving away a blank canvas or a blank piece of paper."

Pilcher quickly filled the blank piece of paper with two more successful books - September and Coming Home - and set her children up for life: the greatest satisfaction her money could buy.

"They had struggled for long enough. We've had two divorces and various babies being born at the wrong time - all the usual traumas, but you come through them. At least now they've all got good houses which they own." The eldest son, Robin (also a novelist), and his family live in a farmhouse set in 400 acres near Dundee, inherited from his paternal grandparents. Fiona has just bought a "grown-up" stone house in Somerset. Phillipa lives on Long Island, and has a beach house in Hawaii, and the youngest son, Mark, farms in Cornwall. "They are all sensible and have enough to see them through if they're careful."

Pilcher's new book, Winter Solstice, has what Dunne calls "emotional wallop", dealing as it does with the universals of widowerhood, overcoming grief, finding love. Her central character, Elfrida, is childless and "past the age when her heart leapt for joy" on seeing an attractive man. But that doesn't stop her from being surprised by life. "You're lovers?" inquires a young relative. "We are." You cannot accuse Rosamunde Pilcher of cheap thrills.

Central to the story is the violent death of a child. "I can't imagine anything more dreadful," she says.

The Pilchers had a fifth child, Amanda, who died after five days, but she is adamant that the death of a baby does not compare. "Some babies are not meant to survive and she wasn't. She was very sick. The paediatrician, a very godly man, said to Graham: 'I think we'll let this one go', and I've never ceased to remember him and to be grateful to him.

"I never saw the child, never held her, so I wouldn't be so presumptuous as to say I suffered as other mothers did. She was just a little burden I was allowed to put down very early on and walk away from."

Though she insists that her books don't have messages, Winter Solstice reads like an antidote to the counselling industry. In the depths of bereavement, it argues, there is nothing more to be wished for than the hand of a friend. "People are left alone to mouse along, putting one worn gym shoe in front of the other and getting through the days until, gradually, the sky looks blue again."

Pilcher says she believes strongly that "life is part of death and death part of life". With characteristic briskness, she says she doesn't want to think very much about eternity. "There are very few people I want to see again. I'm not a great believer in the afterlife. I can't see it as anything other than the most hideous cocktail party. All you'd see would be the people you didn't want to see, and all the ones you wanted to see you wouldn't be able to find."

But perhaps, when she gets there, someone will accost her with the words that put her on the map: "Rosamunde Pilcher, where have you been all my life?"

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ROSAMUNDE PILCHER could easily be a character in one of her own novels. Serene, gracious and quietly humorous, the best-selling British author is all of a piece with the well-bred, intelligent people she writes about.

"I guess I write about them because they're the sort of people and the way of life I know the most about," Pilcher said in an interview at Mary Washington College last week.

Pilcher, 75, was in Fredericksburg for the semiannual meeting of the Regents of Kenmore. She has been a regent since 1994.

Officials at the college took advantage of her presence in town to snag her for two lectures-one for students and one for the President's Book Club and Authors Series.

Pilcher has written novels and short stories for more than 50 years. She achieved international best-seller status with her 1987 novel "The Shell Seekers," followed by "September" in 1990 and "Coming Home" in 1995.

She mined a lifetime of practicing her craft for hints to give the budding writers among Mary Washington's undergraduates.

For one thing, Pilcher said, she must get to know her characters before she can figure out what they're going to do.

"You have to live with them, talk to them for a long time. Then you can put them in situations. ... The plot comes from the characters," she said.

She told the students they have to decide whether they're writing to get a check at the end of the process or just for themselves. If they're writing for money, they have to know what's going to sell.

"I'm not desecrating art," Pilcher said, "but you have to decide if you're going to fish or cut bait."

She has been financially successful for years, but widespread recognition took its own sweet time arriving on Pilcher's doorstep. She was 14 when she decided she wanted to be a writer, and she started with short stories. She later tried novels, and as she persevered, she said, her books became less trivial, less predictable. She was 60 when she wrote "The Shell Seekers," her first international blockbuster.

"That's quite a long time to wait," she said.

The daughter of a commander in the Royal Navy, Pilcher was born and raised in Cornwall, that romantic appendage to England's southwestern edge.

"I was a voracious reader; I lived in a house filled with books," she said.

Her mother's sister, who lived in Philadelphia, gave Pilcher's family a subscription to the Ladies Home Journal every year, and young Rosamunde devoured its short stories.

"I absorbed the techniques," she said.

Her father was away much of the time, and her only sibling was a much older sister. But Rosamunde enjoyed solitude.

"I was happy to be on my own," she said. " There was so much going on inside my head."

Porthkerris, the little Cornish town where so much of her writing is set, is actually a fictional name for St. Ives, where she grew up, she said.

"Place influences what you write," she told the Mary Washington students. "I think place is terribly important."

Pilcher has lived in Scotland since marrying a Scotsman 53 years ago, and that landscape plays almost as large a part in her writing as Cornwall.

"Coming Home," her most recently published novel, is close to being autobiographical, she said.

"It's not me, but all the same things happened to me."

Set before and during World War II, it re-creates a world now vanished.

"I wrote it for my grandchildren," she said. "I wanted them to know what it was like."

Pilcher has 13 grandchildren, five of whom live on Long Island.

"It was rather fun to write about something so real, a kind of self-analysis, I guess," she said.

She sold her first short story while serving in the Far East with the Women's Royal Naval Service during World War II. A London women's magazine bought it for 15 guineas. She was 18, and she thought that was a fortune.

"That was one of the best days of my life," she said.

She married Graham Pilcher in 1946 at the age of 22, and soon began to write again.

"I wanted to make some money," she said. She didn't like depending on her husband for pocket money.

She did her writing in the kitchen, while keeping house and raising two sons and two daughters.

"If I shut myself away, everyone would come and beat on the door. If I was in the kitchen, nobody bothered me. They took no notice at all."

She wrote on a manual typewriter for years but now uses a word processor.

She's dryly amusing about her high-tech skills.

"I can do double spacing, and I can do italic. I can't store, but I've learned to print out before switching off the machine."

The word processor doesn't give her the same satisfaction as the typewriter.

"I loved to bang away and pull sheets of paper out of the machine. I felt like I was accomplishing something."

She's working on another book, this one about Christmas and the way it brings people closer to each other.

She and her husband still live in Perthshire, Scotland, near Dundee, with two long-haired dachshunds named Daisy and Polly.

When she's not writing she gardens, takes care of her husband and tends the dogs.

"It keeps me so busy I wonder how I ever had time to write," she said.

"But when I’m writing, I wonder how I ever had time to do anything else." back to top