Jilly Cooper, the British author of novels such as Rivals and Riders whose 1980s bestsellers were a blend of sex, satire and class-based snobbery, has died aged 88, her agent said in a statement yesterday.
Cooper, a longstanding friend of Britain’s Queen Camilla, sold 11 million copies of her books in Britain alone.
From the mid-1980s, her raunchy novels depicting the romantic adventures of an upper-class set of characters in the fictional county of Rutshire, modelled on Gloucestershire where she and Camilla both lived, gained huge commercial success.
Camilla called Cooper, a life-long dog-lover who was a guest at her 2005 marriage to King Charles, a ‘wonderfully witty and compassionate friend’, in a statement issued by Buckingham Palace.
“Very few writers get to be a legend in their own lifetime but Jilly was one, creating a whole new genre of literature,” Camilla said. “May her hereafter be filled with impossibly handsome men and devoted dogs.”
Last year, Rivals found a new generation of fans when it was made into a series for Disney+. Sales of books published decades before shot up once again, as the themes of adultery and class rivalry thrilled younger audiences.
“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,” Cooper’s agent, Felicity Blunt at Curtis Brown, said in the statement.
Cooper was born in Essex in 1937. In the 1960s, she was a newspaper columnist for the Sunday Times, commenting on marriage, sex and household chores, before she started writing novels in the 1970s.
It was not until Riders in 1985 that she had her breakthrough.
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