The delightful, smutty world of Jilly Cooper

“The ‘Queen of the Bonkbusters’ is dead,” said Rowan Pelling in The Independent. And millions are mourning a woman who was not just the author of a string of bestselling books, but also “a symbol of something profoundly British and endlessly comforting”.

From her home in rural Gloucestershire, Jilly Cooper conjured a captivating world of rolling hills, faithful hounds, Agas, “cocktail hours, rogues called Rupert, sweet girls called Taggy, al fresco orgasms and laughing in bed”. The writer Caitlin Moran – who fell for Cooper’s novels while growing up on a council estate in Wolverhampton – once described it as “Sex Narnia”. The dogs, horses and other animals in Cooper Land don’t talk, of course, but they are as carefully drawn as her human characters, “and their deaths often more tearjerking”.

As for the sex, there is an awful lot of it, which made her books, including the early romances with posh girls’ names – Harriet, Octavia etc. – the “ultimate contraband at girls’ schools in the 1970s and 1980s”. But Cooper was the “Mrs Kipling of sex”: it was naughty but nice, and written with mischievous humour.

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‘Brilliant energy’

The word “bonkbuster” conveys the Rutshire books’ focus on sex and their “joyfulness”, said Olivia Laing in The Guardian – but “it doesn’t quite do justice to their wit and complexity as social comedy, let alone the beadiness of Jilly’s eye on class, her knack for satirising selfishness and pretension, and her gift for understanding loneliness and isolation”.

There were ice queens in her world, but her heroines tended to be warm-hearted “ugly ducklings”; her characters soldiered on through their darker times; and holding it all together was a “rich connective tissue composed of lovely landscape writing, social satire, silly jokes, highbrow quotations… and endless puns”. With their “brilliant energy”, comedy, fresh observation and fascination with social nuance, these novels fit within a literary tradition, said Philip Hensher in The Spectator. They have already lasted 40 years, far longer than is normal for bestsellers; I wouldn’t be surprised if they became classics.

Grateful for life

Yet being a Jilly fan was never just about the books, said Sarah Vine in the Daily Mail. It was also about her. Ever-smiling, she was famously fun and strikingly generous with her time; she was kind to everyone, supportive of other writers, and brave too.

In 1990, it emerged that her husband, Leo, had had a long affair; it broke her heart but she opted to forgive him, and then nursed him through his final years. She never stopped being grateful for her life.