On October 6, the news broke that author Jilly Cooper had died, aged 88.
"Mum, was the shining light in all of our lives," her children Emily and Felix said in a statement sharing the news.
"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."
A prolific romantic novelist and journalist, Cooper’s life was almost as colourful as those of the characters in her books.
Early days
Cooper was born Jill Sallitt, on February 21, 1937, in the town of Hornchurch in Essex.
Her father was a brigadier – W.B. Sallitt, who went onto be awarded an OBE – and the young Jilly grew up in Ilkley and Surrey, going to Godolphin Boarding School in Salisbury from the age of 11.
“Reading was a religion in our house when I was growing up,” she wrote in a piece for the Telegraph. “Then, at 11, I went to a boarding school in Salisbury with a wonderful English mistress who made literature even more exciting. She brought the characters to life.”
After high school, Cooper attempted to get into journalism. In 1956, she got a job as a reporter on the Middlesex Independent, and, as her website would have it, was sacked from 22 different jobs before ending up in book publishing, working for Harper Collins.
“One day I wrote a short story myself and showed it to my editor,” she wrote in her Telegraph piece. “She said, ‘You’re a lousy editor, but not a bad writer, so you’d better do that.’ That’s where my writing career began.”
Married life
In 1961, she married her husband Leo. “The day after I met Leo, he sent me a letter saying how heavenly it was to meet me and quoted poetry. It was wonderful,” she said.
The pair had originally met as children in 1948, but married when she was 24, and she remained married to him until his death in 2013, but married life was difficult. Cooper gave up her career to care for their children, and while Leo spent his weekends playing rugby, she spent it doing housework and hiding her bills underneath piles of washing and burning the food. Once, she heard her neighbours describing the family as living in “engaging squalor.”
Cooper described her marriage as “intense”, and wrote in her column that “I get sick with jealousy if I think Leo is interested in someone else.” She contemplated leaving him several times, but ultimately didn’t.
Early on in her marriage, Cooper discovered that she couldn’t have children. The pair adopted two children – Felix and Emily – and later said she would have loathed pregnancy.
“I got the fantastic bonus of a career, suddenly becoming a writer. From infertility came this explosion of creativity,” she said.
It also influenced her career as a novelist in more ways than one: “I so longed for a baby”, she once said, “that we didn’t bother with birth control. Perhaps for this reason, my books have never been precautionary tales.”
Journalist
Her start as a fully-fledged journalist came with a chance meeting at a dinner party. She met the editor of the Sunday Times Magazine, Godfrey Smith, and regaled him with stories about her attempts to be a good wife, and the chaos of married life at her home in Fulham.
He asked her to write a feature – and from there, this became a column called The Young Wife’s Tale, where Cooper wrote (among other things) about marriage, sex and housework – and which last from 1969 to 1982.
“I had a newspaper column for 13 years and wrote some pretty outrageous things,” she explained. “People were horrible and my poor mother had to put up with it. She was very proud, but if she didn’t ring by 10 o’clock on a Sunday, the day my column came out, I knew I’d goofed.”
From here, Cooper branched out into writing novels. “My first book”, she said, “was smugly entitled How to Stay Married, but that was in 1969 when I knew nothing.”
That was followed by a series of non-fiction books, which dug into her relationship with the class system in Britain.
Fiction
A career writing fiction wasn’t far behind. In the 1970s, Cooper was working in the publicity team for Harper Collins, and editor Desmond Elliott commissioned her to write six books, all of which were hugely successful.
The first was called Emily, and was published in 1975; she wrote one book every six months. Then came the Rutshire books, which cemented her position as an icon of romantic novels. Her first was Riders, which came out in 1985 and was an international bestseller – but it took her more than a decade to finish.
The first draft of the book was written in 1970, but when she’d finished it, Cooper took it with her on a trip into London and left it on a bus. The Evening Standard put out an appeal, but the manuscript was never found, and a “devastated” Cooper took more than a decade to start writing again.
This was followed, eventually, by Rivals (which was of course adapted into a Disney+ series in 2024), Polo, The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous and Appassionata; over the course of her life, Cooper would ultimately write a whopping 48 books.
They sold in their hundreds of thousands, introducing audiences to the world of the glamorous, wealthy and sexually rapacious inhabitants of Rutshire county. Famously, Cooper took great pains to avoid accidentally naming real people in her stories.
"You have to be very careful not to use real people's names by mistake, as they might sue you if they behave badly in the story," she has said (though apparently, her stallion/ stud owner Rupert Campbell-Black was inspired by a mixture of Queen Camilla's former partner Andrew Parker Bowles, fashion designer Rupert Lycett-Green and the Earl of Suffolk).
Later in life, she also confessed that the sex scenes in her books were partly inspired by her long-time marriage.
"You have to imagine you're having it with somebody. I had a heavenly husband who died 10 years ago and he was wonderful at sex. So I used to just imagine what we'd been up to.”
It wasn’t all sunshine though. In 1990, Leo’s long time mistress, the publisher Sarah Johnson came out of the woodwork – something for which Cooper forgave her husband. She chose to stay with him and the pair moved to Gloucestershire in an attempt to start anew. “Aside from loving him”, she said at the time, “I like him so much.”
There was also the little matter of staying alive: Cooper was a passenger in the 1999 Ladbroke Grove train crash, when a Thames Trains passenger train collided head on with a First Great Western train. It killed 31 people and injured 417, and was one of the worst rail accidents in British history.
"I saw this bright orange flash and thought this is it, my number has come up," she said later.
Cooper survived, of course. Her daughter Emily later described how she escaped by crawling through one of the derailed train carriages, brushed herself down and hailed a taxi to the Ritz. She had somebody else’s blood on her shirt, but when she was asked if she wanted to see a post-trauma specialist, she replied, “Don’t be silly. I’m alive!”
Later life
In later years, things got tougher. Leo was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2002, and Jilly became his carer. Two years later, she followed in her father’s footsteps and was awarded an OBE for services to literature.
"Everyone is asking me why I keep on writing and I think it's a bit sad that it always comes out that I write to pay the bills. That is not entirely true. I actually love the writing process,” she told the National.
"But the fact is that Leo isn't very well and his round-the-clock care bills are horrific. It's probably about £100,000 a year to pay for full-time carers, and that's one reason why I've got to go on writing pretty hard. We are lucky we have heavenly carers. I've got to keep on writing but it's not a problem because I love doing it."
In 2010, she also suffered a minor stroke. “I was sitting there, talking to Leo and suddenly I went sideways and something very odd happened. About five minutes later I felt perfectly all right,” she explained later.
“They just cut you open and scrape the artery. I’m de-furred.... It was a shock because I thought I was tremendously well. I was just in hospital overnight. Poor Leo.”
Cooper lived to see the TV adaptation of Rivals, which aired in 2024. And she did keep on writing: her last book, which was published in 2023, was called Tackle!
