Brittany and Cynthia Daniel have only fond memories of Sweet Valley High creator Francine Pascal.
The twin sisters, 48, starred as Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield in Sweet Valley High, the TV adaptation of Pascal’s beloved book series of the same name. Pascal was also an executive producer on the teen dramedy, which ran for four seasons from 1994 to 1998.
“She touched the hearts and minds of so many with her entertaining and relatable portrayals of teenage life,” Brittany and Cynthia tell PEOPLE in a statement. “We always felt loved and appreciated by Francine. She’ll be greatly missed.”
Pascal died on July 28 at the age of 92 from lymphoma at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan, her daughter Laurie Wenk-Pascal told The New York Times.
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“St. Martin’s is proud to have been a publisher of Francine Pascal’s Sweet Valley High series whose iconic and beloved characters captivated generations of teens and adults,” a representative for St. Martin’s Publishing Group told PEOPLE in a statement.
Born in Manhattan on May 13, 1932, Pascal grew up in Jamaica, Queens. She studied journalism at New York University and worked as a freelance writer afterwards with articles in True Confessions, Modern Screen, Cosmopolitan and Ladies’ Home Journal.
In the late 70s, she ventured into the world of young-adult novels with Hangin’ Out With Cici in 1977, which later received a sequel and was developed into an afternoon TV special. Two years later, she released My First Love and Other Disasters and the following year, The Hand-Me-Down Kid.
But she gained widespread recognition in the 80s with the publication of the young adult Sweet Valley High series, which the author envisioned as a sort of teenage version of the hit CBS series Dallas.
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“Sweet Valley is the essence of high school,” Pascal told PEOPLE in 1988. “It’s that moment before reality hits, when you really do believe in the romantic values — sacrifice, love, loyalty, friendship — before you get jaded and slip off into adulthood.”
The popular book series, like the 90s TV show, followed Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield, whom she also described to PEOPLE then as “the most adorable, dazzling 16-year-old girls imaginable.” The book series, which would go on to sell 200 million copies, gaining a huge following with teenage girls and spawned several spinoffs, including Sweet Valley Twins, Sweet Valley Kids and Sweet Valley Junior High.
“These books have uncovered a whole population of young girls who were never reading,” Pascal said in 1988. “I don’t know that they’re all going to go on to War and Peace, but we have created readers out of non-readers. If they go on to Harlequin romances, so what? They’re going to read.”
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While Pascal penned the first 12 books herself, she eventually handed off the writing to a team she oversaw, providing outlines and a “bible” of character descriptions for the writers to follow.
She also wrote several books for adults, including a nonfiction book in 1974 about the Patty Hearst trial, The Strange Case of Patty Hearst, the horror novel Save Johanna! in 1981 and If Wishes Were Horses in 1994, a fictionalized memoir about her life with her late second husband John Pascal.
