Dame Jilly Cooper: ‘Queen of the bonkbuster’ who wanted to write ‘happy books’

Author Dame Jilly Cooper, dubbed “the queen of the bonkbuster”, will be remembered for her racy reads and playful sense of humour after a career spanning decades.

Best known for her steamy fiction, Dame Jilly’s favourite literary themes included scandal and adultery in upper class society, and she sold more than 11 million books in the UK alone, according to her website.

The first novel in her Rutshire Chronicles, Riders, published in 1985, made the BBC list of 100 important English language novels in the love, sex and romance selection alongside Jane Austen’s Pride And Prejudice.

Reflecting upon her career after becoming a dame, the author said she always wanted to write “happy books”, adding: “The only thing I wanted to do in life was to cheer people up and people can get quite depressed, so I do like to tell lots of jokes.”

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 said she moved to public relations and was sacked from 22 jobs before ending up in book publishing.

In 1968, she got a break when she met Godfrey Smith, the editor of The Sunday Times Magazine (then called The Sunday Times Colour Section), at a dinner party who commissioned her to write a piece, which led to a regular column in which she wrote openly about sex, marriage and housework.

Her first book, How To Stay Married, was soon published and in the 1970s she began turning her magazine stories into the romance novels Emily, Bella, Imogen, Prudence, Harriet and Octavia, along with a collection of short stories called Lisa & Co.

In March 1972, the author rated famous men such as British actor David Niven and former Labour chancellor Roy Jenkins by how she thought they would be in bed in the first UK edition of Cosmopolitan.

Both Riders and Rivals, published in 1988, went to number one in the bestseller lists and 1991 novel Polo became the highest-selling hardback novel of the year.

Set in the 1980s, with the backdrop of the Cotswolds countryside, Rivals was adapted into an award-winning Disney+ drama in 2024 starring David Tennant as Lord Tony Baddingham and Danny Dyer as businessman Freddie Jones.

In 1998, Dame Jilly received a lifetime achievement award, which has also been won by JK Rowling, Martin Amis and Terry Pratchett, at the British Book Awards.

The following year, she survived the Paddington rail crash.

She said of the experience that she believed she was going to die when her train carriage overturned, but she escaped unhurt by climbing through a broken window on the First Great Western train.

The author became a CBE for services to literature and charity during the 2018 New Year Honours.

In 2023, she was made a dame and later described receiving the honour from the King as “orgasmic”.

Dame Jilly was a long-standing friend of the Queen, who described the author as a “legend” and a “wonderfully witty and compassionate friend to me and so many”.

Her fictional seducer and showjumper Rupert Campbell-Black is said to be partly based on the Queen’s ex-husband Andrew Parker Bowles.

In 1961 she married publisher and her childhood sweetheart Leo Cooper, whom she was with for more than half a century before his death in November 2013 at the age of 79.

Their marriage had its ups and downs and in 1993 Dame Jilly discovered he had been having an affair with a colleague for six years.

They adopted two children, Emily and Felix.

After her husband’s death, the novelist said she had joined dating site Tinder “only for research purposes” and that she was not really looking for love again.

A known animal lover, Dame Jilly was a patron of charities and spearheaded the Animals In War Memorial Fund in 1998, which led to a memorial being unveiled in Park Lane in November 2004.

In 1994, the author sent the judge in a case concerning pit bull terrier Buster, who faced destruction, a fax pleading for clemency for the dog, which the judge later described as “a clear contempt of court”.

She has been listed as a patron for Compassion in World Farming, the Racehorse Sanctuary and Rehoming Centre and Secret World Wildlife Rescue.

Not one to shy away from expressing her views on sexual politics, Dame Jilly appeared to be a critic of the #MeToo movement, saying that women and men “can’t flirt any more”, in a 2018 interview with the Sunday Times.

Speaking to the paper, the author said her lothario character Rupert Campbell-Black, who features in many of her books and is known for his sexual exploits, “would be locked up in prison” in the current climate.

The writer said she felt for those speaking out about sexual abuse and harassment, and that it was “horrible, horrible, horrible”, adding: “But what worries me is that some poor man at the end of his life will be hauled out and told that he jumped on somebody in the year BC.”

As with all of her books since Riders, Dame Jilly wrote her most recent work Tackle!, published in 2023, on her trusty manual typewriter named Monica.