Dame Jilly Cooper dies aged 88: ‘Queen of the bonkbuster’ author who wrote Rivals and Riders passes away after a fall as devastated family pay tribute

Celebrated novelist Jilly Cooper has died aged 88 after a fall, her family has announced. 

The ‘Queen of the bonkbuster’ author was famed for her raunchy romance novels, selling more than 12million books in her career. 

Her children Felix and Emily said her death on Sunday morning has come as a ‘complete shock’. 

They said in a statement: ‘Mum was the shining light in all of our lives.

‘Her love for all of her family and friends knew no bounds. Her unexpected death has come as a complete shock.

‘We are so proud of everything she achieved in her life and can’t begin to imagine life without her infectious smile and laughter all around us.’

Dame Jilly Cooper’s agent Felicity Blunt issued a similarly warm tribute, saying the author was ‘sharply observant and utter fun’.

The author was best known for her books in The Rutshire Chronicles, featuring the showjumping lothario Rupert Campbell-Black.

The depiction of the bedroom antics of the polo-playing classes proved a huge hit with millions of readers seeking naughty bed-time reading.  

Rivals, the first and perhaps most famous book in the series, was published in 1985.

It made the BBC list of 100 important English language novels in the love, sex and romance selection alongside Jane Austen’s Pride And Prejudice. 

It was recently adapted for television by Disney+. 

In a signal of how she remained very active in her later years, Dame Jilly held a party for the cast at her home in Gloucestershire in August. 

Also among the attendees was friend Andrew-Parker Bowles, the former husband of Queen Camilla.

The ‘famously naughty’ former Army officer is said to have been the inspiration for Campbell-Black.

Dame Jilly and Queen Camilla met in March this year when the author attended the launch of the Queen’s Reading Room medal at Clarence House.

Camilla told her: ‘I’m so proud of you. For all you’ve done.’ 

The novelist lost her husband, Leo Cooper, to Parkinson’s disease in 2013. 

The author had known him since she was nine years old and refused to send him into a care home even when his condition worsened.

Dame Jilly confessed that she only continued to write novels in her later life to pay for her husband’s medical bills. 

Her agent Ms Blunt said in reaction to her death: ‘The privilege of my career has been working with a woman who has defined culture, writing and conversation since she was first published over fifty years ago.

‘Jilly will undoubtedly be best remembered for her chart-topping series The Rutshire Chronicles and its havoc-making and handsome show-jumping hero Rupert Campbell-Black.

‘You wouldn’t expect books categorised as bonkbusters to have so emphatically stood the test of time but Jilly wrote with acuity and insight about all things – class, sex, marriage, rivalry, grief and fertility.

‘Her plots were both intricate and gutsy, spiked with sharp observations and wicked humour. 

She regularly mined her own life for inspiration and there was something Austenesque about her dissections of society, its many prejudices and norms.

‘But if you tried to pay her this compliment, or any compliment, she would brush it aside. 

‘She wrote, she said, simply “to add to the sum of human happiness”. In this regard as a writer she was and remains unbeatable.’

She added: ‘Emotionally intelligent, fantastically generous, sharply observant and utter fun Jilly Cooper will be deeply missed by all at Curtis Brown and on the set of Rivals.

‘I have lost a friend, an ally, a confidante and a mentor. But I know she will live forever in the words she put on the page and on the screen.’

Born in Hornchurch, Essex in 1937, Dame Jilly grew up in Yorkshire and attended the private Godolphin School in Salisbury.

Her father was a brigadier and her family moved to London in the 1950s where she became a reporter on The Middlesex Independent when she was 20.

She has said she moved to public relations and was sacked from 22 jobs before ending up in book publishing.

Dame Jilly was a newspaper columnist for the Sunday Times in the 1960s, writing about marriage, sex and housework.

She started writing novels in the 1970s, but it wasn’t until Riders in 1985 that she had her breakthrough. 

Her work has been adapted at various points, including an ITV series of The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous with Coronation Street star Stephen Billington and Downton Abbey actor Hugh Bonneville, while Marcus Gilbert starred in a Riders series during the 1990s.

She won the inaugural Comedy Women in Print lifetime achievement award in 2019 and was made a dame for her services to literature and charity in 2024.

A new book by Dame Jilly is due to be published through Transworld in November.

How To Survive Christmas is described as ‘an irreverent and witty guide to surviving the festive season.’

Her publisher Bill Scott-Kerr said: ‘Working with Jilly Cooper over the past thirty years has been one of the great privileges and joys of my publishing life.

‘Beyond her genius as a novelist, she was always a personal heroine of mine for so many other reasons. 

‘For her kindness and friendship, for her humour and irrepressible enthusiasm, for her curiosity, for her courage, and for her profound love of animals.

‘Jilly may have worn her influence lightly but she was a true trailblazer.

‘As a journalist she went where others feared to tread and as a novelist she did likewise.

‘With a winning combination of glorious storytelling, wicked social commentary and deft, lacerating characterisation, she dissected the behaviour, bad mostly, of the English upper middle classes with the sharpest of scalpels.

‘It is no exaggeration to say that Riders, her first Rutshire chronicle, changed the course of popular fiction forever.

‘Ribald, rollicking and the very definition of good fun, it, and the 10 Rutshire novels which followed it, were to inspire a generation of women, writers and otherwise, to tell it how it was, whilst giving us a cast of characters who would define a generation and beyond.’

He added: ‘A publishing world without a new Jilly Cooper novel on the horizon is a drabber, less gorgeous place and we shall mourn the loss of a ground-breaking talent and a true friend.’

Dame Jilly’s funeral will be private in line with her wishes, according to her agent.

A public service of thanksgiving will be held in the coming months in Southwark Cathedral to celebrate her life, with a separate announcement made in due course.