So Jilly Cooper is gone. And with her, it feels, goes the key to a certain room in the English house that has now been locked for good.
The tributes are everywhere, of course. Full of words like ‘naughty’, ‘joyful’, ‘queen’. And she was all of those things. But reading them, you get the sense of a public grappling with what, precisely, has been lost. It’s more than just a beloved author. It feels like we’ve lost a language.
The lazy label, of course, was ‘bonkbuster’. It’s a word that’s both true and a complete misdirection. Yes, there was sex. Gallons of it, usually in a hayloft or against the side of a horsebox. But to focus on that is to miss the entire point. It’s like saying The Great Gatsby is a book about nice shirts.
What Jilly Cooper was, really, was an anthropologist with a wicked sense of humour and a profoundly compassionate heart. She wasn’t just writing romances. She was filing meticulously detailed, deeply felt reports on the habits, codes, and private sorrows of a very particular, very strange English tribe.
And here’s the most important, and perhaps least-known, fact about her. She wasn’t one of them. Not really. Jilly was a middle-class grammar school girl, the daughter of an army officer. She gained entry to that world of crumbling estates and endless adultery through observation and, one suspects, a genius for listening. She was the ultimate insider-outsider, which is why her eye was so beadily, devastatingly accurate. She saw the absurdity and the snobbery, but also the loneliness and the quiet desperation that fuelled all the noisy, drunken fun.
Before the big, sprawling novels, she was a journalist, writing columns for The Sunday Times where she created characters to chronicle the mayhem of her own domestic life. That’s where she honed her craft: turning the everyday into comedy, finding the profound in the ridiculous. That journalistic muscle never left her.
Her anchor, the quiet centre of her whirlwind world, was her husband, Leo Cooper. A publisher, but not of frothy novels. He was a distinguished publisher of military history. Can you imagine a more perfect, more English contrast? Her life’s work documenting the frothy, chaotic battles of the heart and the bedroom, his documenting the cold, hard facts of Waterloo and the Somme. He was her first reader, her sounding board. He was the one who, in later years, faced Parkinson’s disease with a courage she wrote about with heartbreaking honesty, a strength that puts the fictional dramas of her characters into sharp perspective.
You see that steel in her work, if you look past the champagne. Her heroines, in particular, were her great triumph. Everyone talks about the rakes like Rupert Campbell-Black, but it was the women who were her true subject. They were so often a mess. Clumsy, plump, prone to tears, perpetually broke and in love with the wrong man. But they were never, ever victims. They were resilient. They had a powerful sense of kindness, a deep love for animals, and an instinct for getting back up after being knocked flat. In a world that was starting to demand glossy perfection from women, Jilly’s heroines were a glorious, comforting, deeply human mess.
I remember a publisher telling me years ago, with a mixture of awe and exasperation, that Jilly’s books were “structurally a complete disaster but utterly, addictively alive.” And that was her secret, wasn’t it? She didn’t plot her books in the conventional sense. By her own admission, she’d let the characters get away from her, let them run riot across the page, and she would just do her best to keep up. Reading a Rutshire Chronicle isn’t like following a neat narrative path. It’s like being invited to a massive, chaotic country house party already in full swing and just trying to keep track of who is sleeping with whom, who is feuding with whom, and which dog belongs to which person.
It was a world that, even as she was writing it, was beginning to disappear. A pre-digital, pre-woke England of casual indulgence and unspoken rules, where loyalty to your horse was often stronger than loyalty to your spouse. She didn’t just record that world. She mythologised it. She took its component parts – the class anxiety, the love of the countryside, the obsession with animals, the stiff upper lip that could tremble but never break – and spun them into a kind of modern folklore.
In the end, what she leaves behind is so much more than a shelf of funny, sexy books. She leaves a record of a vanished emotional landscape. She understood courage and heartbreak, the comedy of social embarrassment, and the profound, life-saving solace of a dog resting its head on your knee. She knew that life is mostly about just getting on with it.
We’ve lost our best, kindest, and funniest social historian. Oh Jilly. I hope Leo was there to meet you. I hope it was a sea of wagging tails.
