The secret to writing good sex?
According to Dame Jilly Cooper, the answer was simple. “Keeping it fun,” she said in an interview in 2023.
Known as the “Queen of the bonkbuster”, Dame Jilly’s filthy and funny novels sold millions around the world.
Sex, glamour, horses, posh people behaving badly; her most famous works include Riders, Polo, The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous, and of course, Rivals, which found a new audience thanks to a hugely successful Disney+ television adaptation last year.
Her books have been ubiquitous since the 1980s, instantly recognisable for their simple but suggestive covers – the red stiletto! the tight jodhpurs! – and beloved for their blend of risqué storylines and critique of Britain’s class system.
As her agent Felicity Blunt said in tribute following her death at the age of 88: “You wouldn’t expect books categorised as bonkbusters to have so emphatically stood the test of time but Jilly wrote with acuity and insight about all things – class, sex, marriage, rivalry, grief and fertility.”
Born Jill Sallitt in Hornchurch, Essex, in 1937, she came from a well-known Yorkshire family; her great-grandfather founded The Leeds Mercury newspaper and was a Liberal MP for the city. Her family moved back to Yorkshire when she was a toddler, but she later attended the private Godolphin School in Salisbury.
Her own writing career began in 1956, when she started as a cub reporter on the Middlesex Independent, covering everything from “fetes to football”.
She moved into public relations – and was apparently sacked from 22 jobs, according to her website biography – before ending up in book publishing.
Her big break came in 1969, when The Sunday Times magazine published an article she had written “on being a hopelessly undomesticated young wife” – resulting in a regular column for the newspaper in which she wrote openly about sex, marriage and housework, running for more than 13 years. She would later write for five years for The Mail on Sunday.
Her first book, How To Stay Married, was written in 1969, eight years after her marriage to her husband, publisher and childhood sweetheart Leo Cooper. In 1972, she wrote for the first UK edition of Cosmopolitan – rating famous men such as British actor David Niven and former Labour chancellor Roy Jenkins by how she thought they would be in bed.
In 1975, Dame Jilly started a series of “permissive” romance novels with Emily, based on previously published magazine stories – her first fiction in book form.
But it was Riders, the first novel in her raunchy Rutshire series, published in 1985, that changed everything. Featuring showjumping lothario Rupert Campbell-Black, the book went straight to number one in the bestseller lists, as did the follow-up, Rivals, in 1988. Polo, in 1991, was the biggest-selling hardback novel of the year, and The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous, in 1993, remained at number one for eight weeks.
It took a little longer for critics to catch up, though. While her writing genius is now widely acknowledged, for years she was a victim of cultural snobbery, her novels often dismissed as trashy. But fans couldn’t get enough.
Set in the fictional county of Rutshire, the innuendo-laden series continued throughout the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s, with novels including Appassionata, Score!, Pandora and Mount! The most recent, Tackle!, which took on the beautiful game, came out in 2023.
Several of Dame Jilly’s works have been adapted for television and film, including a Riders TV film in 1993, and an ITV series of The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous, starring Stephen Billington and Hugh Bonneville, in 1997.
Most recently, there was Disney+’s Rivals, which set the tone straight away: mile high club sex (Concorde, naturally) and Robert Palmer’s Addicted To Love.
Featuring an all-star cast including David Tennant, Danny Dyer, Alex Hassell, Emily Atack, Nafessa Williams, Aidan Turner and Katherine Parkinson, the Cotswolds-set series brought a modern-day lens to the 1980s without sweeping the worst aspects of the era under the carpet, and was released to glowing reviews and viral online commentary (thanks in no small part to a spot of naked tennis).
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After being nominated for several BAFTAs, the second series is due in 2026.
Dame Jilly was appointed an OBE for services to literature in the 2004 Birthday Honours, and CBE for services to literature and charity in the 2018 New Year Honours. Her damehood came in the New Year Honours last year; she received the accolade from the King in an experience she described as “orgasmic”.
Reflecting upon her career after becoming a dame, the author said she had always wanted to write happy books. “The only thing I wanted to do in life was to cheer people up and people can get quite depressed, so I do like to tell lots of jokes,” she said.
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Her other awards included a lifetime achievement prize at the British Book Awards in 1998, and the inaugural Comedy Women in Print lifetime achievement award in 2019.
She suffered difficulties in her life, and famously survived the Paddington rail crash in 1999. She said of the experience that she believed she was going to die when her train carriage overturned, but she escaped unhurt by climbing through a broken window on the First Great Western train.
In 2013, she lost her husband Leo, at the age of 79, after more than 50 years of marriage.
After his death, she said she had joined dating site Tinder “for research purposes” but was not really looking for love again.
As well as her books, Dame Jilly was known for her love of animals. She was a patron of charities and spearheaded the Animals In War Memorial Fund in 1998, which led to a memorial being unveiled in Park Lane in November 2004.
She leaves behind her children, Emily and Felix, and five grandchildren.
Following her death, tributes have been paid by everyone from her family to TV stars to the Queen, who described her as “a legend in [her] own lifetime” who “created a whole new genre of literature” and made it her own.
Camilla ended with a wish for her “witty and compassionate” friend: “And may her hereafter be filled with impossibly handsome men and devoted dogs.”
Dame Jilly would certainly have approved of that.
