\"The Cadfael Chronicles\" Edith Pargeter Hand Signed FDC Date 1960 For Sale

Up for sale "The Cadfael Chronicles" Edith Pargeter Hand Signed First Day Cover Date 1960.

ES-5601E

Edith

Mary Pargeter OBE BEM (28 September 1913 – 14 October 1995), also known by

her nom de plume Ellis Peters, was an English

author of works in many categories, and was also honoured for her translations of Czech classics.

She is probably best known for her murder mysteries, both historical and

modern, and especially for her medieval detective series The Cadfael Chronicles. Pargeter was born in the Her father was a clerk at a local ironworks. She was England School and the old Coalbrookdale High

School for Girls.[1] She had Welsh ancestry, and many of her short

stories and books (both fiction and non-fiction) are set in Wales and its

borderlands, or have Welsh protagonists. During World War II,

she worked in an administrative role in the Women's Royal Naval Service (the "Wrens") and

had reached the rank of petty

officer by 1 January 1944 when she was awarded the British Empire Medal (BEM) in the New Year

Honours. In 1947 Pargeter fascinated by the Czech language and culture. She became fluent in Czech

and published award-winning translations of Czech poetry and prose into

English. She devoted the rest of her life to writing, both nonfiction and

well-researched fiction. She never attended university but became a self-taught

scholar in areas that interested her, especially Shropshire and Wales. Birmingham University gave her an honorary master's

degree. She never married, but did fall in love with a Czech man. She remained

friends with him after he married another woman. She was pleased that she could support herself

with her writing from the time after the Second World War until her death. Pargeter

wrote under a number of pseudonyms; it was under the name Ellis Peters that she wrote

her later crime stories, especially the highly popular series featuring a Benedictine monk at the Abbey in Shrewsbury.

That pseudonym was drawn from the name of her brother, Ellis, and a version of

the name of the daughter of friends, Petra. Many of the novels were made into films for

television. Although she won her first award for a novel written in 1963, her

greatest fame and sales came with the Cadfael Chronicles, which

began in 1977. At the time of the 19th in the series of 20 novels, sales

exceeded 6.5 million.[4] The Cadfael Chronicles drew

international attention to Shrewsbury and its history, and greatly increased

tourism to the town. In an interview in 1993, she mentioned her own work before

the Second World War as a chemist's assistant, where they prepared many of the

compounds they sold. "We used to make bottled medicine that we compounded

specially, with ingredients like gentian, rosemary, horehound. You never see

that nowadays; those tinctures are never prescribed. They often had bitters of

some sort in them, a taste I rather liked. Some of Cadfael’s prescriptions come

out of those years." Her

Cadfael novels show great appreciation for the ideals of medieval Catholic

Christianity, but also a recognition of its weaknesses, such as quarrels over

the finer points of theology (The Heretic's Apprentice), and the desire of the church to

own more and more land and wealth (Monk's Hood, Saint Peter's Fair, The Rose

Rent).