Susan Sallis Bio

Her birth name was Susan Hill. She grew up in Gloucester and attended Denmark Road High School.

Her father worked on the railways, and the working-class Gloucestershire world she grew up in would quietly underpin much of what she later wrote. Her upbringing gave little hint of a writer in the making, and she came to fiction sideways, through false starts and rejection.

Sallis started to write aged 28. She went on a writing course but found it “soul-destroying”, and at first her work was rejected when she submitted it to women’s magazines. She then had stories accepted by Woman’s Realm. Those early acceptances were enough to keep her going.

Later, she went to St Matthias, Bristol, to train as a teacher. She enjoyed learning about children’s literature on her course, and, aged 39, started to write novels. She also worked as a primary school teacher between 1969 and 1974. Teaching gave her something writing courses never could, because it taught her how stories reach people who are still working out what they want from them.

Her first book, An Open Mind, was published in January 1978.

She also wrote three books under the pseudonym of Susan Meadmore, her maiden name. The early work included fiction for young adults, and three of the titles in her papers at the de Grummond Collection deal with issues about handicapped teenagers. Only Love (1979) is about a handicapped girl named Frannie who falls in love but is frightened by a secret she may have to share. It drew on Sallis’s direct experience, as she had met patients at a local hospital whose circumstances shaped the character of Frannie. It was reissued in 1981 as Sweet Frannie. These books gave her a reader who trusted her with difficult emotional material, and that trust followed her into her adult fiction.

The work that established her reputation as a saga writer came in 1984. A Scattering of Daisies transported readers back to the turn of the twentieth century and drew them into the lives, loves, and fluctuating fortunes of a Gloucester family.

She had written the series about her mother’s family in Gloucester, and A Scattering of Daisies was where it started. That personal connection threads through every chapter, visible in the specific detail she brought to working-class Gloucester life. The Rising family starts with Will Rising, who dragged himself from humble beginnings to his own small tailoring business in Gloucester, and his wife Florence. Their story carries through their children, including March, the eldest daughter, plain and overlooked, who had inherited some of her mother’s dreams and was determined to break out of the round of poverty and hard work. This was the texture of lives Sallis had reason to understand from the inside, rooted in family memory and given force by her mother’s own history. The Rising Family series runs to four novels: A Scattering of Daisies, The Daffodils of Newent, Bluebell Windows, and Rosemary for Remembrance.

Rosemary for Remembrance concludes the story of the Rising Girls, begun in A Scattering of Daisies, The Daffodils of Newent and Bluebell Windows.

After the saga sequence, Sallis settled into the form she would make her own: standalone novels built around women facing grief, transformation, and the weight of the past, nearly always anchored in West Country landscapes. In Choices, Helen’s life changed when her parents and fiancé were killed in a car crash. As she came to terms with her loss, she discovered that Miles had kept something from her that made her see him in a different light, and she moved to a cottage near the Bristol Channel to begin a new life.

The publisher was Transworld, and the book appeared in 1997. It was the novel that broke her through to a substantially larger readership, with Transworld committing to press and radio campaigns designed to move her beyond the supermarket shelves and into general bookshops. Sarah Broadhurst, writing in The Bookseller in 1999, noted that Sallis “broke through last year with Come Rain or Shine”, adding that while the bulk of her sales came through W H Smith and mixed multiples, “she deserves to have bookshop sales too.” The same piece described her as “a sophisticated, sensitive writer”, and Transworld was concentrating on press and radio profiles alongside normal marketing to expand her audience.

Her books were categorised in The Bookseller as “major sellers”. Searching for Tilly (2007) was in the top ten mass-market sellers, and Rachel’s Secret (2008) sold 65,000 copies in its first year. The readership she had built across two decades was loyal, and it grew steadily rather than in sudden lurches.

Searching for Tilly is a useful example of how her mature fiction worked. Three women came to a remote Cornish cottage for the summer: Jenna, only twenty-six and grieving for the loss of the love of her life; her mother Caro, whose husband had also died; and Laura, who had been married to Caro’s beloved brother Geoff. The house was called the Widow’s Cottage. In that tiny Cornish community they discovered strange memories of their ancestors, especially of Tilly, Caro’s mother, whose family history seemed to mirror their own, and they became swept up in an epic journey to unravel a startling family mystery. That structure, of women brought together by loss and drawn deeper into the past, recurs across many of her novels, each one returning to a question Sallis seems to have found genuinely inexhaustible: how grief shapes memory, and how family secrets survive across generations.

Susan Sallis was the author of over twenty bestselling novels, many of them set in the West Country. She was born in Gloucestershire and settled in Clevedon, Somerset with her family in the early 1960s.

Her books sold over a million copies across her career.

Her final novel, Learning to Dance, was published in April 2015. She died in June 2020, aged 90.

Susan Sallis Books

The following are among the most widely read Susan Sallis books, drawn from her adult fiction:

The Rising Family Series

• A Scattering of Daisies (1984)
• The Daffodils of Newent (1985)
• Bluebell Windows (1987)
• Rosemary for Remembrance (1987)

Selected Standalone Novels

• An Ordinary Woman
• Come Rain or Shine
• Choices (1997)
• The Keys to the Garden (1999)
• Five Farthings
• The Apple Barrel
• Sea of Dreams
• Summer Visitors
• Time of Arrival
• Searching for Tilly (2007)
• Rachel’s Secret (2008)
• No Man’s Island
• After Midnight
• The Pumpkin Coach
• Lydia Fielding
• The Promise
• Daughters of the Moon
• By Sun and Candlelight
• Sweeter Than Wine
• Learning to Dance (2015)