Jenny Colgan: ‘The Jilly generation learned so much from her’
Jilly Cooper was a genuinely merry soul, with a gimlet eye and a determination to see the best in absolutely everything; even when her life was difficult, she brightened every room with her spaniel hair. What fun she had and shared with us, and what a wonderful legacy she left.
It would be easier to count the novelists of my generation who didn’t read her. Not just the world-conquering Riders and Rivals, but all the way back to the Emilys and Olivias (all with pretty Jilly on the cover). When Lisa Jewell and I met her we literally sat at her feet in hero worship. (It was, incidentally on an author’s edition of The Weakest Link; even Anne Robinson couldn’t be mean to Jilly, so of course she won, and used the prize money to build a statue to brave animals.)
The Jilly generation learned so much from her: that the correct amount of perfume to wear is roughly half a bottle, so that you trail it like a ship’s wake. To never underestimate the power of clean hair. That it is perfectly fine and normal to get a bit sweaty and red in the face while throwing a dinner party, have casual sex with stable hands or get paralytically drunk at any given opportunity. It is not at all fine to be greedy, to gossip about someone while pretending to pity them, or show off about – or even mention – your children. And of course one must vow eternal vengeance on anyone who so much as snubs an animal of any sort.
She cast quite the spell in person too. Many the journalist, plied with her generous pouring hand, didn’t quite make it back in time to file copy (and then were fulsome when they did). Last year, at the age of 87, she was asked what it was like to receive a damehood from the King. “Orgasmic,” she replied. You couldn’t send her a Christmas card without receiving treasured Jilly Mail in her spidery handwriting. No charitable cause went without a donation.
It was wonderful that in her later years she finally got the screen adaptation in Rivals she truly deserved. In tribute, the producers had a “no arseholes” casting policy, to make sure they kept her fun atmosphere, and it shows in every shot.
That world – of smoking in offices, driving home after drunken lunches and making money in television – is fast disappearing in the rear-view mirror, and now we have lost its best chronicler too.
But it is nice to hope she got her wish, that: “When you arrive in heaven, all your dogs come rushing across a green lawn to meet you.”
Olivia Laing: ‘A person of total generosity and life’
Dame Jilly Cooper was the absolute queen, a person of such total generosity and life. She started out as a journalist before writing a much-loved column for the Sunday Times about the mayhem of her domestic life as a new wife. A clutch of surprisingly sweet romantic novels was followed by Riders, the first in a long-running series of bonkbusters known collectively as the Rutshire Chronicles.
“Bonkbuster” captures the essential joyfulness of these books, the central role of sex, but it doesn’t quite do justice to their wit and complexity as social comedy, let alone the beadiness of Jilly’s eye on class, her knack for satirising selfishness and pretension and her gift for understanding loneliness and isolation. Her Cinderellas are nearly always ugly ducklings too, like clumsy dyslexic Taggie and the decidedly plump and plain Kitty Rannaldini. Between the moments of high romance is a rich connective tissue composed of lovely landscape writing, social satire, silly jokes, highbrow quotations (George Herbert, Dylan Thomas) and endless puns.
The Disney adaptation of Rivals brought her a new surge of appreciation, including a damehood. She was still working on edits and notes to the very last. It strikes me now that her books were as much about work as sex or love: about people who adored what they did, who got up in the cold and dark to train, who fought against poverty and injury to achieve brilliance. That was Jilly. The pinnacle is probably in Riders, when a heartbroken Rupert Campbell-Black competes in the Olympics with a dislocated shoulder (perfect for the reformation of this rake that he’s rewarded with a team and not individual gold medal. Jilly’s flirtation with Thatcherism only goes so far).
Then there are the animals. Periodically in my teenage years my mother would be woken by the sound of racking sobs. What on earth is wrong, she’d ask. Sailor’s died, I’d choke. From Badger the black lab to Gertrude the terrier with her perpetually outraged look, Cooper understood about the loyalty of animals, the place they have for people who are alone or struggle to trust. Her own retinue of much-loved rescue dogs kept her company after her adored husband Leo died.
And now my head is full of scraps from her books. There’s Rupert muttering “I’d like to see Badger again” and cow parsley like scurf. There’s Sailor’s big heart giving out and the horses galloping to see Jake, and Fenella’s sharkskin jodhpurs splitting and everyone sending her to Coventry. Books about courage and getting up and getting on, about transformational haircuts and the luck of love, which is above all having a person whose eye you can catch, dissolving into giggles at some absurdity. Taggie with her misspelled sign at the airport, Imogen’s makeover in Saint-Tropez, Harriet with dirty hair in the hospital, waves of Miss Dior and the woods turning and catching your heart. Oh Jilly. I hope Leo and Bluebell came to greet you, I hope you were met with a sea of wagging tails.
Jess Cartner-Morley: ‘The pages practically turn themselves’
It feels impossible that Jilly Cooper could have died, because even though she was 88, she never got old. She was still naughty, and silly, and engaged with the world. Still ravishingly pretty, with her gap-tooth smile and twinkly blue eyes. More than 50 years after she wrote her first book, she was still plugged into contemporary culture: the television adaptation of Rivals, for which she was an executive producer, was the out-of-the-box hit of last year.
I never met Jilly, but I loved her with a passion. (I like to think she would have approved of that. She understood how cheering it can be, as a grownup, to have entirely unrequited crushes, people you adore from afar and who make you smile to yourself while you are doing the washing up.) I have written about her, applied to be an extra on the TV show, even took my daughter’s name, Pearl, from a character in one of her books.
Jilly’s best-known character is her great cad, Rupert Campbell-Black, but it was her female heroines who were the heart of her books. It was Nora Ephron who wrote the greatest line of woman-to-woman advice – “be the heroine of your life, not the victim” – but it was Jilly who engraved that mantra on my teenage heart. Jilly’s women are fallible and contradictory and complicated – they spend a lot of time chasing madly inappropriate men and can barely go 20 pages without bursting into tears over something or other – but they are also kind and funny, and never take themselves too seriously.
Jilly’s books made being a grownup look fun. Not just sex, although that was definitely part of it. Her women drove cars and opened bills they couldn’t pay and walked dogs (endlessly) but they were never browbeaten or humdrum. There was always a smouldering glance or a spicy piece of village gossip to liven things up, or a friend who would drop in and sit at the kitchen table to quote Keats or open a bottle of Bolly.
She was wise, with an instinctive cognition that was wrapped in emotion. She knew that the best thing to do on a bad day is to get into the fresh air – she could get positively thigh-rubby about a fresh bank of daffodils or a hedgerow bursting with champagne bubble blossom – or to sing loudly in a hot shower and blow-dry your hair. She knew that life will throw its worst curveballs out of a blue sky, but that this too shall pass and there will be joy at the end of the rainbow, even if that might be 200 pages away.
She was a beautiful writer. Every sentence is crisp, every line of dialogue fizzes. The pages practically turn themselves, full of insight and joie de vivre and alive with Jilly’s unshakeable faith in the ultimate goodness of human nature. Her characters have tennis courts and helicopters. They have Polo mints in their Barbour pockets to win over ponies, and salacious puns up their sleeve to seduce lovers. They have petty rivalries and unsuitable liaisons and cultural blind spots. But most of all: they have fun.
