Over the course of her lifetime, she sold more than 11 million books in the UK alone.<\/p>\n
Gibson said: “What I understand from those people who knew her well, was that she was a bubbly character and I think that came through in her writing.”<\/p>\n
The novelist was born in Hornchurch in 1937 but her family returned to Yorkshire when she was a child. <\/p>\n
Her great-great-grandfather was a Liberal MP for Leeds and founded The Leeds Mercury, a newspaper which merged with the Yorkshire Post.<\/p>\n
Her grandfather went to St Peter’s School in York, and then into the church.<\/p>\n
While in Ilkley, Dame Jilly went to Moorfield before she was sent away to boarding school at the age of 11.<\/p>\n
A spokesperson for the school said: “The Moorfield community was saddened to hear yesterday of the death of Dame Jilly Cooper. <\/p>\n
“She was one of Moorfield’s most famous pupils, having attended the Ilkley independent preparatory school during the war years of the 1940s and thereafter.<\/p>\n
“In 1980, Jilly came back to visit to help celebrate the school’s 50th anniversary. She remained a loyal supporter of Moorfield long after she left and had fond memories of her formative years at the school.”<\/p>\n
Dame Jilly described the school as “wonderful and happy” with “dazzling” teaching but admitted she was poor at games.<\/p>\n
At the time she was a pupil, the school was based at the founder’s home on West View before moving to its current site in 1968.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Over the course of her lifetime, she sold more than 11 million books in the UK alone. Gibson…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":480314,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3938],"tags":[3444,77,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-480313","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\/115332730803560012","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/480313","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=480313"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/480313\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/480314"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=480313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=480313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=480313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}