{"id":478738,"date":"2025-10-06T19:13:11","date_gmt":"2025-10-06T19:13:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/478738\/"},"modified":"2025-10-06T19:13:11","modified_gmt":"2025-10-06T19:13:11","slug":"absolutely-divine-how-jilly-cooper-changed-the-world-one-bonkbuster-at-a-time-jilly-cooper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/478738\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Absolutely divine!\u2019 How Jilly Cooper changed the world \u2013 one bonkbuster at a time | Jilly Cooper"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jilly Cooper, who has died unexpectedly at the age of 88, sold 11m copies of her various epic books over her half-century of writing. Beloved of anyone with any sense over a certain age (45), she was introduced to a new generation last year with the Disney+ adaptation of Rivals<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Cooper purists would have preferred to watch the Rutshire chronicles in order: starting with Riders, first published in 1985, in which Rupert Campbell-Black, cad, heartbreaker, rider, is first introduced. But that\u2019s a sidebar \u2013 what was striking about seeing Rivals as a box set was how well Cooper\u2019s universe had aged. The chronicles distilled the 80s: the shoulder pads and puffball skirts; the obsession with class, aristocrats sneering at the Technicolored nouveau riche, both ignoring everyone else while they snipped about how warm their champagne was; the sexual politics, with harassment and assault so routine they were practically characters in their own right, a double act you could trust to move the plot along.<\/p>\n

Alex Hassell and Luke Pasqualino in the Disney+ adaptation of Rivals. Photograph: Robert Viglasky<\/p>\n

While Cooper might have inhabited this age completely, she was never the proverbial fish not noticing the ocean because it\u2019s everywhere. She had a humanity and an observational intelligence that you maybe wouldn\u2019t guess from listening to her speak. Everyone, from the dog to the pony to her parents to her French exchange\u2019s brother, was always \u201cabsolutely sweet\u201d \u2013 unless, that is, they were \u201cabsolutely divine\u201d. People got groped and worse in Cooper\u2019s work, but that was never OK \u2013 it\u2019s surprising how OK it is in many far more literary books of the era.<\/p>\n

She was upper-middle-class, which for practical purposes meant that her father had to work for a living, but she\u2019d have described the classes more by their mores. The middle classes worried about everything, all the time \u2013 what other people might think, mainly \u2013 and the upper classes didn\u2019t give a \u2026 well, she\u2019d have said \u201cstuff\u201d. She was raunchy, at times incredibly so, but her language was never coarse.<\/p>\n

Jilly, c1978. Photograph: Tony Evans\/Timelapse Library Ltd\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

She\u2019d describe her family life in fairytale terms: \u201cDaddy went to Dunkirk and Mummy was terribly, terribly worried\u201d (this is a real thing she said, to Kirsty Young on Desert Island Discs). They were both utterly beautiful, engaged in a lifelong love match, and this Cooper replicated in her own marriage, to a publisher of military histories, Leo Cooper. She was 24, he was 27, the union wasn\u2019t without hiccups (he was a bit of a shagger), but she was never less than comfortable giving people the formula for a happy marriage, which is creaking bed springs but (big reveal), they\u2019re creaking with all the laughter. He never read her books \u2013 he read Prudence once, when he had flu, and said it made him feel worse. She didn\u2019t mind, and said it was reciprocated: she wouldn\u2019t be seen dead reading military history.<\/p>\n

Always keep a diary \u2013 it\u2019s very hard, when you\u2019re 25, to remember what being 24 felt like<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Prudence (1978) was the fifth book in the Romance series, which started with Emily in 1975. If you came to Cooper backwards, having started in Rutshire, the Romances, AKA \u201cthose ones named after posh girls\u201d \u2013 also Imogen, Bella, Octavia and Harriet \u2013 were close but no cigar, every hero feeling like a test-run for Campbell-Black, every heroine a little bit drippy. Plus, page for page (I haven\u2019t actually run the numbers, but just trust me), there wasn\u2019t as much sex in them. They were a bit uptight on matters of modesty, women always worrying that men would think they\u2019re loose, men saying batshit things about why they preferred virgins (in much the same way, apparently, as a real man always wants to be the first to open a jar of Nescaf\u00e9). I don\u2019t know if I\u2019d recommend reading these novels at a formative age. I thought for a while that that\u2019s what posh people really thought.<\/p>\n

They were, however, incredibly tightly written, high-functioning romances, which is much harder than it sounds. You lived Harriet\u2019s unwanted pregnancy, Bella\u2019s pissy in-laws, Emily\u2019s Scottish isolation \u2013 Cooper could take you from an all-is-lost moment to a lottery win of the heart, and you could never, even in the early days, put your finger on how she did it. One minute you\u2019d be laughing at her incredibly close descriptions of the bed linen, the next you\u2019d have tears in your eyes and no idea how they got there.<\/p>\n

At home with her pets in 1982. Photograph: Kim Sayer\/Alamy<\/p>\n

Asked how to be a writer, Cooper used to say the kind of thing that Ernest Hemingway would have said, if he could have been arsed to help out a novice: use all five of your senses, say how things smelled and looked and sounded and felt and tasted \u2013 it really lifts the prose. But probably more useful was: \u201cAlways keep a diary \u2013 it\u2019s very hard, when you\u2019re 25, to remember what being 24 felt like.\u201d That\u2019s one of the first things you notice, in the longer, more populated books, which have 17 heroines rather than just one, all with extremely posh names, unless they\u2019re American, in which case they\u2019re called Helen. Even an age difference of four years, between two sisters, between a man and a woman, you can hear in the dialogue.<\/p>\n

Katherine Parkinson and Danny Dyer in Rivals. Photograph: \/Robert Viglasky<\/p>\n

The origin story of Riders was so pitch-perfectly Jilly Cooper<\/a> it can\u2019t possibly have been true, except it definitely is true because London\u2019s Evening Standard ran an appeal about it at the time: she finished the whole manuscript in 1970, well before the Romances, took it into the West End and left it on a bus. Some texture has been deliberately left out of this story \u2013 what, for instance, was so important in the West End that you would leave the only copy of your book on a bus, which is not that far from leaving your baby on a train? Surely an assignation, but what kind?<\/p>\n

Jilly at her home near Stroud, October 2024. Photograph: Francesca Jones\/New York Times\/Redux\/eyevine<\/p>\n

Cooper was wont to amp up her own chaos and haplessness \u2013 loved telling people, for instance, that she was fired from 22 jobs when she started working \u2013 and this was just a charming shortcut to put people at their ease since there was nothing ditzy about her. She had a mind like a mantrap. Anyway, the manuscript never did turn up and she was so devastated that it took her more than a decade to start again. Praise be that she did, because these books are absolutely fantastic.<\/p>\n

The original cover of Riders has a guy\u2019s hand on a woman\u2019s jodhpurred butt, and one of them is carrying a riding crop, but it\u2019s genuinely hard from the framing to figure out which \u2013 not uncharacteristic of her love arcs, actually. It\u2019s never immediately obvious where they\u2019ll land. To look at now, you\u2019d think: that\u2019s exactly the cover you\u2019d expect a bonkbuster to have, but that\u2019s because Jilly Cooper invented the bonkbuster (OK, fine, I\u2019ll take your case for Jackie Collins, but some other time).<\/p>\n

A fan reading Polo by Jilly Cooper at a polo match in the Cotswolds Photograph: Roger Hutchings\/Corbis\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

That look wasn\u2019t a cliche when Riders did it, and was considered quite scandalous, particularly in the kind of Cotswolds bookshops where all Cooper\u2019s characters would have actually bought their books, had they had any time to read, which they absolutely did not, because they were always, always shagging. The books were banned in the school library of Cooper\u2019s daughter, Emily (not named, I don\u2019t think, after the novel), until the author pointed out that those filthy books were paying for the school fees, whereupon they were unbanned.<\/p>\n

With her husband, Leo, in 1972. Photograph: David Reed Archive\/Alamy<\/p>\n

By the late 80s, Jilly Cooper was known, everywhere, as sex-obsessed. Spitting Image had a puppet of her, which just popped up and said \u201csex sex sex sex sex\u201d, and she found that hilarious, whereas in fact it was condescending and rude, and I\u2019d like to see anyone involved in Spitting Image sell 11 million of anything. She used to tell people that was a hangover from an all-girls boarding school: it turned you boy-mad \u2013 a classic narrative-build from someone raised in the 1940s upper-middle-classes, because she absolutely hated boarding school and thought it was like a prison. Of course, it would be unspeakably crass to dwell on the trauma; much funnier to ogle the caretaker.<\/p>\n

For my money, Rutshire should have ended at Polo (1991), a book so stunningly romantic that I can still start crying at the name \u201cPerdita\u201d and I sure as hell am not talking about Shakespeare\u2019s one. The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous and Appassionata aren\u2019t as good, and then we get into the exclamation mark titles (Score! Jump! Mount! Tackle! \u2013 that last written only two years ago, and it was flabby, but not gonna lie, I was happy to see the Campbell-Blacks again, even though Taggie had cancer).<\/p>\n

Cooper started her career in journalism (she interviewed Harold Pinter once, but was more famous for raunchy short stories and columns) and had a massive, unexpected soft spot for journalists \u2013 all of us, it often seemed. If you ever wrote about her, she\u2019d write you a little postcard \u2013 a friend got a wooden postcard of Banksy\u2019s gun-toting panda. I wrote about my ardent admiration when she got her OBE in 2004, and got a little card saying, \u201cThank you, but I didn\u2019t realise I was lowbrow\u201d, and I felt bad about that but I\u2019m medium-sure she was joking.<\/p>\n

She was a magnificent storyteller who defies categorisation, having invented her own category. It\u2019s impossible to say how she did it, but worth taking a look back at Riders to see if you can figure it out. It will take you eight hours, and you\u2019ll need some champagne.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jilly Cooper, who has died unexpectedly at the age of 88, sold 11m copies of her various epic…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":478739,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3938],"tags":[3444,77,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-478738","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115328817732078939","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/478738","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=478738"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/478738\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/478739"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=478738"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=478738"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=478738"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}