British comic novelist Jilly Cooper has died earlier this week. Writer Philip Hensher is among the first to pay his respects. This was published in The Spectator where he offered a thoughtful description of her writings, noting that they fell into two distinct categories:
…The first, a series of shorter, often very charming romances were written in the 1970s. The second is a cycle of 11 wonderfully sprawling novels, from Riders in 1985 to Tackle! in 2023. They are set in roughly the same English rural territory, with excursions to more metropolitan and international settings. Most of them engage with particular professional activities – racing, classical music, schools, football. Characters return in major or minor roles from one novel to the next, just as in Trollope.
After a thoughtful discussion of the two categories, Hensher concludes:
…Most writers disappear quite quickly, despite orchestrated acclaim, sponsorship, the assertions of scholarship and the awards of prizes. The books that last might have surprised the literary community of the day. Barbara Pym survives and Nancy Mitford. 1940s commentators were quick to insist that Evelyn Waugh’s comic novels were ‘poor things’ next to the works of Nigel Balchin.
Cooper’s novels have already lasted astonishingly well. Might it be that their qualities will keep them in place? They are funny; they are inexhaustibly interested in individuals; they are written with an unflagging verve and energy; they have, in spades, what the most high-minded among us have always, mistakenly, deplored in even the greatest of novelists, an appalling degree of vulgarity. Most people loved Dame Jilly in person and freely admitted it. Maybe the time will come when these gloriously pleasurable novels are, rightly, esteemed and read without guilt or apology.
The Daily Telegraph’s obituary contains this description of Jilly from another author who was also a personal friend:
…Anthony Powell’s impression, noted in his diary, was that she was “funny, intelligent (and possessed of a) curious depth of melancholy, one would guess”. When she appeared on a “famous authors” episode of the quiz show The Weakest Link, she proved to be remarkably well-read. She intended to write a “proper novel” one day, she explained, but observed that “if you want to write like George Eliot, you don’t have great big knickerbocker glories of people ending up happily at the end.”
The Times, in addition to a thoughtful and thorough unsigned obituary had a memoir by journalist Caitlin Moran. Here are some excerpts from her description of Jilly’s writings:
Well, I don’t think anyone could worry it was a wasted life. Or a dull one. Decades before anyone coined the phrase “work hard, play hard”, Dame Jilly Cooper, or, as she was then, just plain Jilly Cooper, mother of two, resident in first south London, then the Cotswolds, was an absolute machine for turning out sparkling copy. Thousands of words a day; column after column; book after joyful book. Decades as one of the weekly must-reads in The Sunday Times; 26 non-fiction books; 4 books for children; and 18 novels, 11 of them making up the Rutshire Chronicles.
It is the Chronicles, in which Rutshire is a thinly veiled depiction of her adored Cotswolds, for which Cooper was most famous. These books, Riders, Rivals, Polo et al, singlehandedly invented the British bonkbuster and, I would argue, made the Cotswolds the global hotspot for celebrities they are today. If, as was rumoured last month, Beyonce and Jay-Z are moving there, it’s part of a direct causal chain that began in the mid-1980s with Cooper sitting topless in her garden in the summer (“You might as well get a tan while you write!”) with her typewriter, bashing out Riders and kick-starting the reinvention of the British countryside as somewhere, yes, beautiful, but also as full of intrigue, glamour and scandal as New York or London.
Before Cooper, the Cotswolds were just where, decades before, Laurie Lee had had his ciderous kisses with Rosie. After Cooper’s eye had revealed their late-20th-century reality, they became Britain’s answer to the Hamptons.
And no wonder, because Cooper’s writing was truly addictive. You wanted to know her take on everything. What she’d noticed. Where she’d been. Who she’d heard was shagging whom. If you were a Jilly Cooper fan, it was like she was sending you regular, smart, ludicrously amusing yet constantly well-observed letters on everything: class, love, marriage, motherhood, heartbreak, the trials of Christmas, the joy of the English countryside, champagne, dogs. And sex, of course. Lots of sex. For many women of my generation, teenagers in a time before the internet, Cooper’s bonkbusters were where we learnt about sex: good, bad and frequently hilarious…
