One of Jilly Cooper’s beloved manual typewriters – used to write her bestselling, scandal-filled Rutshire chronicles – is to go under the hammer at auction.
The Olivetti Underwood Lettera 32, which has a guide price of £10,000 to £15,000, was affectionately known by the late author as Monica 2.
Christie’s auction house announced the inclusion of the typewriter in a live auction on 9 December as the highly anticipated new series of Rivals, the television adaptation of Cooper’s most famous work, returns.
The award-winning Disney+ show combines TV industry intrigue with the backdrop of the Cotswolds countryside in the fictional guise of Rutshire. It features racy sex scenes involving a wide cast of characters.
The auction – named Love and Lust: A Literary Guide – brings together roughly 30 books, manuscripts, letters and cultural artefacts celebrating romance, desire and storytelling across the centuries.
The Monica 2, which dates from around 1964, took pride of place among a number of typewriters owned by Cooper. It was found in her office at The Chantry, her home in Bisley, Gloucestershire, after her death in October last year at the age of 88.
Cooper frequently referred to it as “Monica” in interviews but in reality this was shorthand for a succession of trusted machines, with Monica 2 coming before another Monica, which was bought at the Conservative party conference in 1982.
Whenever that Monica was away being serviced by an enginer called Colin – the only repairer Cooper trusted – Monica 2 was brought in from the gazebo to return to active duty.
Typewriters were central to Cooper’s methods: she typed all her work on them, ranging from Sunday Times and Daily Mail journalism to her hit novels.
Drafts were built up layer upon layer, with new passages typed and stapled directly over earlier versions before being retyped by assistants.
Cooper typed in various locations around The Chantry, including in her upstairs office, her late husband Leo’s “War Room”, the terrace where she famously claimed to work topless in the sun, and the gazebo, where Monica 2 was used to write her 2010 Rutshire-set racing novel, Jump!
In an early interview, Cooper recalled how her typewriter kept her working when others were left helpless by an outage.
She said: “She came into her own … when the whole of Gloucestershire had a power cut and I was typing away in the gazebo, oblivious, while everyone back in the house was effing and blinding and stumbling around in the darkness. Monica’s wonderful. I’ve got a pair of scissors attached to her now so that I can do my own cutting and pasting.”
An inquest held last year concluded that Cooper suffered a fatal head injury in a fall at her home. She was found by family on 4 October 2025.
Thais Hitchins, head of sales at Christie’s, said: “Few modern writers are so deeply associated with the typewriter than the late Dame Jilly Cooper. To bring her beloved Monica 2 typewriter to auction alongside works associated with Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker, Lady Hamilton and great chroniclers of love, longing and seduction creates a fascinating dialogue between literary history and popular culture.
“Few objects evoke the act of storytelling so directly, and few could be more fitting for a sale celebrating the greatest expressions of love and lust.”
