Author whose bestselling novels, including Riders and Rivals, were set deep in an English countryside where the natives pursued land, sports, and each other, with lust and gusto
The writer Jilly Cooper, who has died aged 88, was a Georgian at heart, with all the 18th century’s preference for country above city, reason above passion, and mutual pleasure above sexual sufferance. Many of her bonkbusters were based in her fictional counties of Rutshire and Larkshire, where upper and middling natives pursued land, sports, profitable businesses, and each other, with lust and gusto, as in the works of Henry Fielding.
The novels were robust, and full of comic observation – she had a caricaturist’s eye for telling contrasts of detail, a handsome sleek horse next to a shaggy-shanked pony. They sold and sold, around 11 million copies in the UK.
The journalist Caitlin Moran once suggested that Riders (1985), Cooper’s first hit, was “written by someone ablaze with desire”, and must have been stimulated by an affair. Cooper replied: “I just fell in love with the countryside, that was what made me come alive. I was having an affair with the whole of the Cotswolds.”
She had originally completed the book, under the title Bloods (meaning public-school athletic heroes), in 1969, during her chaotic early career, but lost the manuscript on a London Transport number 22 bus after a very liquid lunch. Fourteen years later, after a move to the country, the sudden threat of financial ruin forced her to write it again urgently, even dictating a chapter over the phone to the publishers.
