In her many interviews in The Observer over the years, the late queen of the bonkbuster was charming and candid. Here are some of the best extracts
Introduction by Barbara Ellen. Interviews curated by Rachael Healy
There was something about Cooper that was simultaneously as British and cosy as Winter-mittens – reminiscent of the Norman Thelwell cartoons of the little girls and their rambunctious ponies – and naughty as hell.
She was the embodiment of her fabled “bonkbuster” books, then, which sold in their millions. Those collectively known as The Rutshire Chronicles – including Riders (1985) and 1988’s Rivals (adapted by Disney Plus in 2024 to great acclaim) – brimmed with tales of sex, class, rivalry, extramarital gallivanting and fine-looking toff-bounders, such as Rupert Campbell Black; unabashed Polo-playing alphas with rakish attitudes and very tight jodhpurs.
Characters such as Campbell Black – rumoured to be based on Queen Camilla’s first husband, Andrew Parker Bowles – perhaps most encapsulated the author in the public imagination. Cooper was our cad-whisperer-in-chief. She also popularised a good-humoured, chaotic, quintessentially British attitude to sex: we might not be very good at it, but we enjoy it immensely.
No wonder her books became tantamount to literary sex-ed for generations of young women, who thrilled to the tales of high-octane ravishing in the shires. Can some of it now feel dated? Of course, as much as anything written decades ago. Just as there was sometimes a sense of socioeconomic – as well as sexual – fantasy in all that elitist frolicking in horseboxes in the bluebell woods of a fictional Cotswolds.
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Nevertheless, Cooper, who was made a dame in 2024, was a deft stylist: as much an observer of social codes, emotional vacuums and relationship torpor as she was of sexual appetites. Above all, Cooper had a genius for “writing human”: her characters – flaws and all – lived and breathed on every page.
Cooper’s gifts have been much celebrated over the years within the pages of The Observer. In the following articles, she can be seen: debating if “anything is immoral in human sex” in 1985 with Anne Kelleher; offered as a “corrective to the stereotype of Anglo Saxon inhibition” in a review of 2002’s Pandora by Robert McFarlane. Cooper is declared “impossible to dislike” in a 2006 interview with Rachel Cooke; while, in 2007, Cooper tells Caroline Boucher about enjoying a “lovely snog” with Sean Connery.
Between the Covers by Jilly Cooper
Cooper was a columnist for The Sunday Times between 1968 and 1971, covering topics from holidays and house moves to pets and sex. A collection of her journalism was published in 2020, reviewed by The Observer’s Rachel Cooke.
“Unlike some columnists today, she doesn’t go in for emotional incontinence; spilling her guts, you feel, is about as appealing to her as the thought of housework, and unmannerly to boot (oneself, taken in too large a dose, is boring). But there is nevertheless a truthfulness here, one all the more touching in its quietness.
“Her kindness is instinctive. But this isn’t to say that she can’t be delightfully bitchy. Women who don’t read – "Good Housekeeping seals usually” – are awful, smug and boring, she writes in a column about her addiction to books. And she has a deliciously dirty sense of humour.”
Observer New Review Q&A
Interviewed by Elizabeth Day ahead of the paperback publication of her novel Jump! – the ninth instalment in the Rutshire chronicles – Cooper discussed caring for her husband Leo; the typewriter (named Monica) on which she still wrote her novels; graphic sex scenes; and getting older.
“Sometimes I feel 100 and sometimes I feel about 10. I still have these terrific crushes on people. I'm so knocked out by people. I know it sounds soppy. When you get older you suddenly realise you don't have long left. You've got to get going. I've always wanted to read all the books in the world but I won't ever be able to. It's frightening because I've always thought I'm going to live for ever...”
What I Know About Men…
Cooper, then aged 70 and married with two children, offered a whistlestop tour through her romantic life and her male characters (including the “wicked” Rupert Campbell-Black) in this Observer feature.
“My misspent youth was pre-Pill so I spent the whole time praying for my period to appear. I'm a Pisces with Venus rising, so all I wanted to do was fall in love – which I'd do like a thunderbolt, usually with unsuitable people.”
“The Sixties were fun… I loved random snogs. I remember one dinner party we had in Fulham.... I was out in the hall when Sean [Connery] came by and we had a lovely snog and then went back to the table.”
“I love solid, hunky, athletic men. But let's face it, men are randy buggers. They look down in the shower in the morning, see this thing sticking out and say, ‘Now, what are we going to do today?’”
Jilly’s Japes
As Jilly prepared to publish Wicked! – another instalment from her Cotswolds universe, this time contrasting a comprehensive and a private school, resulting in “general naughtiness across the class divide” – Rachel Cooke visited her Gloucestershire home. She heard how its publication had been a year delayed by life events, including husband Leo’s Parkinson’s diagnosis, and her drive to keep writing to cover the cost of his care. Cooke described a charming woman, showering her houseguests with compliments, and keen to share a spot of gossip.
“She then proceeds to tell me a nice, juicy and, alas, off-the-record story about a semi-famous person. In gossip mode, she is hilariously funny… She then quizzes me about who I know. ‘Is she an old bag?’ she'll say. ‘Is she very unkind?’ She goes after salacious information like one of her precious dogs after a rabbit. She is impossible to dislike.”
Jilly on the set of the New Anglia TV adaptation of Riders.
Laughing All The Way to the Bonk
MacFarlane analyses Cooper’s “recipe” for a literary romp, in a review that judges Pandora “too long and… too silly”. And yet, he declares that the universe of “untrammelled sexuality” she created, with its sleeping around, mutual orgasms, and lack of STIs, “lies at the heart of Cooper’s success. For what she offers the British is a corrective to the stereotype of Anglo-Saxon inhibition… The powerful desire that Jilly Cooper so clearly satisfies in the British people – she has now sold 11m copies of her novels in this country alone – is the desire to see themselves as a bawdy, roistering, sexually guileless race.”
Room of My Own
Interview by Tiffanie Darke, 12 May 1996
The Observer visited Cooper’s Cotswolds home in 1996 to discover where she works and how her personal style has shaped her home. Cooper opens up her writing gazebo, “originally a residence for monks”, with its collection of work-based memorabilia, framed pages from Viz magazine, and family photos.
“There is more to Jilly than low literacy in the shires: she is much more astute than she appears. Her first successes were the novels she wrote in the 1970s about women making independent decisions about sex – progressive subject matter for the time.”
“‘I have no taste, I really have no taste,’ Jilly gushes, excusing herself yet again from the assumptions other people make about her. But down at the bottom of her garden she has her own space, really her own, where she sits with her stories, her dogs and her dignity.”
Jilly with David Tennant and Danny Dyer who play leads in the Disney+ TV adaptation of Rivals.
Can Sex Be Wrong?
Interview by Anne Kelleher, 26 May 1985
Cooper is quizzed on the morality of casual sex, her tendency to make romantic leads “slightly sadistic”, and whether she’s enjoyed being a sex object (she has).
“What, if anything, is immoral in human sex? ‘Cruelty’s immoral. I also believe greatly in good manners. If you’re going to screw around in marriage you ought to try not to be found out. Public humiliation is one of the worst crimes.’
“So sex cannot be immoral – but it can be bad. ‘It’s difficult to define bad sex. For me, it would be if people continually didn’t reach orgasm.’”
Did no work and full pay make Jilly a dull girl?
Interview by Tom Davies, 28 October 1979
Tom Davies meets Sunday Times journalists, including then-columnist Cooper, who’d been off work during an industrial dispute at the paper. Davies recalls Cooper’s lack of confidence when starting out as a columnist, despite her natural ability to shape gossip and observations into compelling copy.
“Jilly is round-faced, gap-toothed, blue-eyed and broad-hipped; she also manages to be a passionate woman who evokes passionate responses. I fell in love with her at first fright.
“Her fortnightly column still fills her with terror; working her up into a state of break-down until she’s finished it, then feeling fine until the nearing prospect of the next one begins terrorising her again… Yet, since the break, she has written no fewer than five books.”
Photographs by PA Images, Reg Innell/Toronto Star, Radio Times/Getty Images,
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