Ah no, not Jilly gone. For all my life, she was a jolly, constant source of the most comfortable of reading escapes. It started in boarding school back in the day, when her first novels, featuring one-word titles of the women they featured were handed around our dormitory in a cycle. I don’t know in which order Emily, Harriet, Bella, Octavia, Imogen, and Prudence came to me, but I read them all voraciously.
Each featured a gorgeous, scatty woman whose name was the book’s featured title, dogs, English countryside, rich handsome men, big communal dinners, country pursuits, lots of genteel swearing, and inevitably, not so genteel sex. They were all so funny, and warm and charming. Each cover featured a soft-focus photograph of a beautiful woman.
These characters with their fancy names all seemed impossibly glamorous compared to my boarding school life in midlands Ireland, or to the nineteenth-century novels I was also reading back then. You can call the Brontë sisters’ brilliant novels many things, but glamorous escapism they are not.
I learned only lately that the photographs on the covers of these books all featured none other than Jilly herself, done up in different hairstyles and make-up. Each time I picked up one of those books, I was actually looking at the author. Wow, is all I could think. What a stunner, and what a stunt.
Irish chef’s restaurant ranked 20th in North America’s Best Restaurants list
Muireann O’Connell: ‘There are people in this country who hate me with the fire of a thousand suns’
Vada restaurant review: Dublin could do with a dozen more brilliant local places like this
Hazel Chu on her cancer diagnosis: ‘I came out of the scan, sat in reception and cried’
[ Jilly Cooper, author of Rivals and Riders, dies aged 88Opens in new window ]
Later, Jilly (I always called her Jilly in my head, not Jilly Cooper), turned out some extremely long novels, all of which I also read. Riders, Rivals, Polo, all featuring horses, creatures I knew nothing about, apart from the fact they had four legs and a tail like a kind of big equine dog. No matter, I fell into the world she created of messy families, boorishly-behaved men, beautiful women, husbands sleeping with women not their wives, drunken rows, racing, polo, dogs too many to enumerate – all with their own characters, fabulous parties, drunken driving and an unethical journalist, Beattie Johnson, whose entire shady modus operandi sounded a whole lot of very glorious fun, although I suspect if I took Beattie as a role model, I might not have lasted very long at The Irish Times.
There was a football novel, Score! Which I ploughed through, knowing even less about football than horses, and Appassionata, about the world of classical music, about which I knew the least of all her subjects. It didn’t matter. These professional backgrounds were all merely a framing device to create subcultures of worlds within which to tell stories of competitiveness, love, treachery, talent, people falling in and out of love and, of course, dogs. Always the dogs, wagging their mischievous tails through every book.
As time went along, I was sad to discover that in real life, lovely Jilly herself had a cheating husband, Leo; a story which became national news. They got back together again after a time, and she cared tirelessly for him in his later years; continuing to write books to pay for his complicated care. That’s how kind she was.
Because at the heart of all her books lay an ineffable warmth and kindness. Of course there were some pantomime villains, and cads, and so many people behaving badly. But it was all written with such joy, I could not stop laughing as I read. Like many, I was stuck to the screen when the marvellous Disney+ adaptation of Rivals came out last year.
Lots of people described her books, pejoratively in my view, as “bonkbusters”. The sex was really only a tiny bit of what made Jilly’s books literally sell by the millions. It was the sweep of her storytelling, the cast of characters, and the glee with which she wrote that made her books so irresistible. I’m sure even Beattie Johnson is writing an obituary for Jilly right now.
