Best-selling author Dame Jilly Cooper has died at the age of 88.
The much-loved author passed away on Sunday morning after a fall, her agent announced.
Tributes are pouring in for Dame Jilly, who had sold over 11 million copies of her books in the UK alone.
Her children Felix and Emily said: “Mum, was the shining light in all of our lives. Her love for all of her family and friends knew no bounds.
“Her unexpected death has come as a complete shock. We are so proud of everything she achieved in her life and can’t begin to imagine life without her infectious smile and laughter all around us.”
Best known for The Rutshire Chronicles, her hit series centred on the charming yet scandalous showjumper Rupert Campbell-Black, Dame Jilly enthralled millions with her sharp, funny, and delightfully risqué portrayals of Britain’s polo playing elite.
Dame Jilly’s first novel in the Rutshire series, Riders, was published in 1985.
It made the BBC list of 100 important English language novels in the love, sex and romance selection alongside Jane Austen’s Pride And Prejudice.
Its most celebrated instalment, Rivals, was adapted for television by Disney+ last year and is currently filming its second season.
In August, the author hosted a party for the Rivals cast at her Gloucestershire home, joined by long-time friend Andrew Parker Bowles, the former husband of Queen Camilla, who is widely believed to have inspired the infamous Campbell-Black himself.
Dame Jilly’s personal life was equally devoted.
She lost her husband, publisher Leo Cooper, to Parkinson’s disease in 2013.
Having known him since childhood, she refused to place him in a care home even as his illness advanced, later admitting she continued writing novels in her later years to help cover his medical expenses.
In the wake of her passing, Dame Jilly’s agent, Felicity Blunt, paid a moving tribute to her “friend, an ally and mentor”.
She said: “The privilege of my career has been working with a woman who has defined culture, writing and conversation since she was first published over fifty years ago.
“Jilly will undoubtedly be best remembered for her chart-topping series The Rutshire Chronicles and its havoc-making and handsome show-jumping hero Rupert Campbell-Black.
“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.
“Her plots were both intricate and gutsy, spiked with sharp observations and wicked humour.
“She regularly mined her own life for inspiration and there was something Austenesque about her dissections of society, its many prejudices and norms. But if you tried to pay her this compliment, or any compliment, she would brush it aside.
“She wrote, she said, simply ‘to add to the sum of human happiness’. In this regard as a writer she was and remains unbeatable.
“In her last few years Jilly added to her curriculum vitae by serving as an executive producer on the Happy Prince adaptation of her novel Rivals for Disney+.
“Her suggestions for story and dialogue inevitably layered and enriched scripts and her presence on set was a joy for cast and crew alike.
“Emotionally intelligent, fantastically generous, sharply observant and utter fun Jilly Cooper will be deeply missed by all at Curtis Brown and on the set of Rivals.
“I have lost a friend, an ally, a confidante and a mentor. But I know she will live forever in the words she put on the page and on the screen.”
Happy Prince Production who produce Rivals shared their own tribute to the late Dame Jilly, branding her “one of the world’s greatest storytellers”, which was reposted by several of the show’s cast including Danny Dyer and Luca Pasqualino.
“We are broken hearted,” they wrote alongside a photo of her on Instagram. “Jilly was is and always will be one of the world’s greatest storytellers and it has been the most incredible honour to have been able to work with her to adapt her incredible novels for television.
“Crawling around on her sitting room floor with storylines on pieces of paper, sitting up late at her kitchen table holding hands with love and our tummies with laughter, receiving scoldings and heaps of wisdom in equal measure, watching her eyes sparkling as she sat behind the monitor on set watching Rutshire brought to life - every moment spent with Jilly Cooper was bloody marvellous.
“We have been so lucky to be able to call her our friend - and know that her legacy will endure in her writing, her television and the encouragement to have fun that she gave us all. X”.
Born in Hornchurch, Essex in 1937, Dame Jilly grew up in Yorkshire and attended the private Godolphin School in Salisbury.
Her father was a brigadier and her family moved to London in the 1950s where she became a reporter on The Middlesex Independent when she was 20.
She has said she moved to public relations and was sacked from 22 jobs before ending up in book publishing.
Her work has been adapted at various points, including an ITV series of The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous with Coronation Street star Stephen Billington and Downton Abbey actor Hugh Bonneville, while Marcus Gilbert starred in a Riders series during the 1990s.
She won the inaugural Comedy Women in Print lifetime achievement award in 2019 and was made a dame for her services to literature and charity in 2024.
A new edition of How To Survive Christmas by Dame Jilly is due to be published through Transworld in November.
The book, first published in 1986, is described as “an irreverent and witty guide to surviving the festive season”.
Her publisher Bill Scott-Kerr said: “Working with Jilly Cooper over the past thirty years has been one of the great privileges and joys of my publishing life.
“Beyond her genius as a novelist, she was always a personal heroine of mine for so many other reasons. For her kindness and friendship, for her humour and irrepressible enthusiasm, for her curiosity, for her courage, and for her profound love of animals.
“Jilly may have worn her influence lightly but she was a true trailblazer.
“As a journalist she went where others feared to tread and as a novelist she did likewise.
“With a winning combination of glorious storytelling, wicked social commentary and deft, lacerating characterisation, she dissected the behaviour, bad mostly, of the English upper middle classes with the sharpest of scalpels.
“It is no exaggeration to say that Riders, her first Rutshire chronicle, changed the course of popular fiction forever.
“Ribald, rollicking and the very definition of good fun, it, and the 10 Rutshire novels which followed it, were to inspire a generation of women, writers and otherwise, to tell it how it was, whilst giving us a cast of characters who would define a generation and beyond.”
He added: “A publishing world without a new Jilly Cooper novel on the horizon is a drabber, less gorgeous place and we shall mourn the loss of a ground-breaking talent and a true friend.”
Dame Jilly’s funeral will be private in line with her wishes, according to her agent.
A public service of thanksgiving will be held in the coming months in Southwark Cathedral to celebrate her life, with a separate announcement made in due course.
