Ruth Elwin Harris won writing competitions as a schoolgirl, and also dramatized a children's novel for a school production. " When I was writing SARAH'S STORY, the first in the series, I became very indignant about the way Frances was behaving, yet when I came to write about the same incidents in FRANCES'S STORY Frances's behavior seemed to me absolutely logical and right." "It was strange how partisan I became," the author says. Each book has a different sister as heroine, and the story is told from that sister's point of view. Years later, when Ruth Elwin Harris sat down to tell the story of the orphaned Purcell sisters, she remembered those letters and their different viewpoints and incorporated the idea into her writing. Friends and family wrote often, and I was amazed at how accounts of the same incidents and people were often so different." Letter writing was the way we kept in touch. "There was no such thing as e-mail then," the author says, "and the telephone was rarely used - it was expensive and calls had to be booked. His house and garden became the model for Hillcrest, the Purcell sisters' family home in the four-part series.Īnother influence came later, when Ruth Elwin Harris emigrated to Canada at the age of twenty-one. To escape the wartime bombing, she and her brother were sent to live with their grandfather in rural Somerset, England. Ruth Elwin Harris says that her historic quartet of novels, THE SISTERS OF THE QUANTOCK HILLS, had its beginnings while she was growing up during World War II.
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