Obituary: Jilly Cooper, saucy novelist who just wanted to make people smile

Photograph by Gareth Iwan Jones for The Observer

For 40 years, Jilly Cooper chronicled the comings and goings – largely the comings – of the rampant Rutshire gentry. It is a land of rotters such as Rupert Campbell-Black, Olympic showjumping champion, Tory minister and handsomest man in all England, and those who lust after them. She wrote with equal enthusiasm about the formidable sort of women who know how to wring a pheasant’s neck. “The male is a domestic animal,” she wrote, “which, if treated with firmness, can be trained to do most things.”

Her books were seldom under-written. Riders weighs in at 919 pages, Rivals relatively short at 716. But they were shared avidly, even if you needed both hands to hold them, spoiling the pleasure for some. Cooper wrote about sex with a smile. Her mission, she told her agent, Felicity Blunt, was “simply to add to the sum of human happiness”. Fans included the Queen, on whose first husband Campbell-Black was based, and, more surprisingly, Rishi Sunak, who praised its “escapism”.

It is a pity, perhaps, that she didn’t write one set in Westminster. (Given her preference for one-word titles, it could have been called Whips! or Order!) But she was a rural girl at heart, happier in a world of huntin’, shootin’ and bonkin’.

She studied her subjects thoroughly, spending time with polo-players, TV producers and orchestral musicians to ensure accuracy. She once rang a Stroud pathologist to check whether the male member stays upright at the point of death.

Around 1990, she went to Palm Beach for research and was introduced to a businessman as a journalist writing “a really naughty book about polo” who was after stories. Donald Trump looked her up and down, said “No thank you” and walked off. A lucky escape for him.

Cooper was a shrewd social observer. Bill Scott-Kerr, her publisher, said she “dissected the behaviour, bad mostly, of the English upper-middle classes with the sharpest of scalpels”. But she was also a fine comic writer, who married the wordplay of Wodehouse to the foreplay of Penthouse.

Her career took off, inevitably, with a jockstrap. Jill Sallitt was born in Essex and raised amid dogs and ponies in the Yorkshire Dales. Aged 32, having failed to hold down a string of jobs and now married to the military publisher Leo Cooper, she found herself at a dinner party next to Godfrey Smith, editor of the Sunday Times Magazine, and told him about accidentally dyeing her husband’s rugby kit pink by putting her scarf in the wash. Smith was delighted by her chaotic ebullience and offered her a regular column.

This led to her first book, How to Stay Married, in which she passed on such useful advice as “Where marriage is concerned, cheerfulness, sexual enthusiasm and good cooking are nearer to godliness than cleanliness about the house”. Or “If you amuse a man in bed he’s not likely to bother about the mountain of dust underneath it.”

Several romantic novels followed, all given the one-word title of their heroine. It took until Riders in 1985 for her to become a publishing superstar. She sold 11 million books.

With her cheery gap-toothed smile, Cooper became a familiar and much-loved figure on television. She was well known for her kindness, sending thank-you notes to almost everyone she met or who wrote about her, and a real enthusiasm for animals. “Do you have dogs?” was her usual ice-breaker. She and Leo adopted two children, Felix and Emily, and were married for 52 years – despite the revelation in 1990 of his having an affair – until his death from Parkinson’s in 2013.

Cooper published her last novel, Tackle!, in 2023, and her books were given a new lease of life last year with a TV adaptation of Rivals for Disney. Despite depicting behaviour and attitudes, not to mention (gasp) smoking, that might upset the sensitive, Cooper was one author who was cancel-proof. “Most television now is all crimes and murders,” she said. “People like love stories to cheer them up. And that’s what I’ve always wanted to do.”

The worst thing about dying, Cooper said a couple of years ago, would be the risk of social embarrassment. She was worried she might get to the afterlife and find her husband chatting to his first wife. On the other hand, she was looking forward to a reunion with her pets. “When you arrive in heaven, all your dogs come rushing across a lawn to meet you,” she said. “That will do for me.”

Jilly Cooper, author, was born on 21 February, 1937, and died on 5 October, 2025, aged 88