Jilly Cooper, romance author who wrote ‘Rivals,’ dies at 88

Jilly Cooper — who has died aged 88 — was the best-selling British writer whose racy novels were famously filled with fun. With suggestive titles such as “Tackle!”, “Mount!” and “Score!”, Cooper’s books were publishing sensations, selling 11 million copies in the UK alone. Her agent Felicity Blunt said on Monday that “she will live forever in the words she put on the page and on the screen... I have lost a friend, an ally, a confidante and a mentor.”

Described by one interviewer as “flirty and quite frankly a riot,” she inspired deep affection and loyalty from her fans. Former British Conservative prime minister Rishi Sunak professed himself “a genuine fan” in 2023, adding: “You have to have escapism in your life.” A 2024 hit adaptation of “Rivals” on Disney+ brought its dashing and caddish hero Rupert Campbell-Black — said to be partly based on Queen Camilla’s former husband Andrew Parker Bowles — to a new audience. “Most television now is all crimes and murders,” Cooper said ahead of the release of the series, in which she even appeared very briefly. “People like love stories to cheer them up. And that’s what I’ve always wanted to do: cheer people up.” Cooper was born Jill Sallitt on Feb.21, 1937 into a well-known family from the Yorkshire region of northern England. Her great grandfather was a regional newspaper proprietor and lawmaker. She began her writing career on a local newspaper before taking a long succession of other jobs from which she claimed to have been sacked.

She returned to newspaper journalism in 1968 when a chance encounter at a dinner party with the editor of the Sunday Times led to a piece about the difficulties of being a “young working wife”.

A regular column followed and ran for 13 years. In 1970 she left the manuscript for “Riders”, her first novel, on a number 22 bus in London after a lunch. It was never recovered and it took her 14 years to start writing it again. Following a series of “permissive” romantic stories published in the 1970s, she eventually revisited “Riders” which became her first big novel when it was published in 1985.

It was the first in an 11-strong series known as the Rutshire Chronicles, the most recent of which — “Tackle!” — was published in 2023. The steamy novels are set in glamorous and moneyed worlds such as polo, show-jumping or classical music in the fictional county of Rutshire. The county is based on the real-life counties of western England’s idyllic Cotswolds region including Gloucestershire, where Cooper lived. “The 1980s really were the most fun time,” she once said.

Cooper’s home was a 14th century manorhouse in rural Gloucestershire from where she bashed out her manuscripts on an old fashioned typewriter named Monica and threw parties for her famous friends. Always commercially popular, her work in recent years has increasingly won literary plaudits too. Poet and academic Ian Patterson in 2017 hailed the unexpected depth of Cooper’s writing with “subplots worthy of Trollope or Dickens”.

Journalist Caitlin Moran of the Times daily even changed her name as a teenager in honour of a character in “Rivals”, and described Cooper as the “Jane Austen of our times”. Never in any danger of being “cancelled”, she did admit, however, that there had been “an awful lot of rewriting” with “Tackle!” in which Rupert Campbell-Black ventures into the world of football. Cooper was married to her husband Leo, a military history book publisher, from 1961 to his death in 2013 after a battle with Parkinson’s disease. The couple had two adopted children. A friend of Queen Camilla, Cooper was honoured by King Charles in 2024 with a damehood for services to literature and charity.

Agence France-Presse