Long before there was romantasy, fairy porn and BookTok there was the bonkbuster — and its undisputed queen Dame Jilly Cooper.
The bestselling novelist has died unexpectedly at 88, her agent announced today, leaving a generation of Brits who got their sex education from her hefty yet racy tomes in mourning. The actual Queen Camilla has paid tribute to Cooper, calling her a ‘legend’.
A bonkbuster, as defined by Cooper’s oeuvre, must be a doorstopper of a book that’s enough to last a beach holiday, and absolutely chock full of bonking. Just huge amounts of shagging. Cooper’s speciality was situating her shag-a-thons in the not-so-private lives of the country set, with horse races and polo matches, posh rakes and ponies.
She topped bestseller lists in the Eighties with the raunchy Rutshire Chronicles, which ran to 11 books and three television adaptations. Dog-eared copies from parental bookshelves were purloined by horse- and boy-mad daughters marooned in the countryside, who passed them round the locker room like contraband.
In honour of the late bonkbuster queen, here are six of her sauciest books to enjoy in her honour:
How to Stay Married (1969)
Cooper began her writing career as a journalist, writing her column on sex, marriage and dinner parties that led to her first book, a work of non-fiction titled How to Stay Married published in 1969. Cooper acknowledged her advice to put ones husband first would be seen as “terribly politically incorrect” today.
Based on her own marriage to Leo Cooper, it was reissued for their golden wedding anniversary in 2011. This led to an awkward moment during a live interview on Radio 4 that year when Dame Jenni Murray raised the topic of Leo’s affair. In 1990 his former mistress Sarah Johnson revealed they’d had a protracted London-based affair while Cooper was working on her novels in the Cotswolds to keep the creditors from the door.
“You suggested in the book an affair might blow over if you turn a blind eye. How useful did you find your own advice when Leo strayed in the Nineties?" Murray asked, to which Cooper replied: "I don't want to talk about it." The Coopers did indeed stay married and Jilly forgave Leo — and admitted she’d once pashed Sean Connery in the kitchen when the actor and his wife came to their Putney home for dinner.
Prudence (1978)
Cooper’s first romance series were all named for their heroines: Bella, Octavia, Imogen, Emily, Harriet etc.
Prudence centres on a debaucherous weekend in the Lake District where the main character, who likes wearing dungarees with no underwear and baking sausage rolls, arrives with one lover and leaves with another. There’s lots of snogging, misunderstandings and partner-swapping.
Some editors have even suggested that Prudence is more shaggable than the infamous anti-hero of Cooper’s later novels...
Riders (1985)
The book that catapulted Cooper to fame and found a legion of fans for the Rutshire Chronicles as the first in the series. Riders introduced the world to Rupert Campbell-Black, the “criminally handsome” and well-endowed aristocratic Tory MP that Cooper claimed was at least partially based on Queen Camilla’s former husband Andrew Parker-Bowles.
In Riders, Rupert duels to be the best show-jumper against his school rival Jake Lovell, the hero of the novel, culminating in a showdown at the Los Angeles Olympics. Rupert is cruel to his horses and not terribly nice to women, but his ability to ride the former and ravish the latter made him the sexy antihero of many women’s fantasies.
It featured a lot of sex, obviously, which wasn’t well recieved from all quarters. “The editor of Horse and Hound said it was a disgusting book,” Cooper told the Guardian in 2016. However, there was general outrage a decade ago when a re-jacketing of Riders’s cover moved the male model’s hand further away from the bum crack of the woman in tight white jodhpurs.
Rivals (1988)
Dastardly Rupert returns in the sequel, where television executives battle it out in the Cotswolds. Cooper was originally sued for libel by Tory councillor William Bullingham over a character named Anthony Bullingham, prompting to Cooper to rechristen him the terribly subtle Baddingham.
While Rupert has yet another nemesis to jostle with (Baddingham), he also falls in love with Taggie, the (rather young) daughter of said rival’s employee. There’s plenty of horny subplots, horses and dogs in the bucolic setting. In 2024 it was adapted by Disney+ into a well-received television series starring Danny Boyle, David Tennant and Alex Hassel as the rakish lead.
The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous (1993)
This is one director Emerald Fennell’s favourite books. Coming from the women who bought us horny bathwater and grave-humping antics in Saltburn (and is set to adapt Wuthering Heights as a bodice-ripper) it’s high praise indeed.
The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous is hunky and impecunious Lysander Hawkley, who comes up with a money-making ruse whereby he seduces the wives of adulterous husbands to make them realise what they’re missing. Amidst all his impressive seduction-for-cash he falls in love with a neglected young wife named Kitty. And yes, there are racehorses and cameos from Rupert Campbell-Black.
Mount! (2016)
The 10th book in the Rutshire Chronicles puts Rupert back in the saddle as he attempts to have his racehorse Love Rat named leading sire. As he travels abroad to ride Love Rat’s progeny to victory, he and wife Taggie are both tempted by extramarital dalliances. Cooper’s famously long cast list at the front of the book runs to 11 pages in Mount!
Cooper undertook extensive research into the world of race horse siring, visiting stud farms and interviewing jockeys and trainers. She was even introduced to the winning racehorse Frankel by his late trainer Sir Henry Cecil, although Frankel tried to bite her the first time she attempted to give him a stroke.
“This however was in Frankel’s racing glory days,” Cooper recalled in an interview with Over the Stable Door. “I met him again the following year by which time he was covering mares, seemed to thoroughly enjoying his career move, and let me pet him.”
Rupert also does plenty of mounting in Mount! as well as making a pun about butter during oral sex that has to be read to be believed. RIP Jilly Cooper, nobody did it like you.
