Dame Jilly Cooper ‘changed the way we read books as women’ – Angela Rippon

Dame Jilly Cooper was “a great people watcher” who changed the way “we read books as women”, according to her friend Angela Rippon.

The author, known as “queen of the bonkbuster” for her Rutshire Chronicles books including Riders, Polo and Rivals, died aged 88 on Sunday after a fall.

Rippon was her friend for many years after they worked together on game show What’s My Line?.

She told ITV’s Good Morning Britain: “She really did change the way that we read books as women. Men loved them as well. They weren’t chick lit at all, they were very intelligent books.”

She added: “When she started producing the Rutshire ones in the 1980s, she had a wonderful ear for conversation, a very sharp mind, and she was brilliant at just picking up nuances in people.

“She was a great people watcher, and she managed to put all of that in her books and make you laugh. I defy anyone to read a Jilly Cooper book and not smile all the way through it.”

The Queen led tributes to Dame Jilly, describing her as a “wonderfully witty and compassionate friend”, adding: “May her hereafter be filled with impossibly handsome men and devoted dogs.”

Dame Jilly was a long-standing friend of Camilla, and the author based her fictional seducer and showjumping lothario Rupert Campbell-Black partly on the Queen’s ex-husband Andrew Parker Bowles.

Rippon said: “She’d known Camilla way, way, way before she got married to King Charles. She’d known her because they were neighbours, and so she’d known her for a very long time. But I think that really does sum her up.

“And what’s lovely is all of the tributes in the papers today, you won’t find anybody with a cross word or an unpleasant word about Jilly. Everybody absolutely adored her. And I love that that old-fashioned word saucy has appeared in a lot of them. She was saucy. She was sexy and she was saucy.”

She added: “What I would like to say is, she wasn’t just brilliant as a writer and made us all laugh. She had a big passion for animals, and I think we should never forget that, alongside all of the other stuff.

“She did that wonderful memorial that was in Park Lane for all the animals that died in every war that there’s ever been, not just horses and dogs and donkeys, but camels and elephants and dolphins and pigeons, all of them.

“Jilly was the prime mover and shaker to get that memorial there. And that’s another side of her character, she so adored animals.”