{"id":204716,"date":"2025-10-11T05:24:09","date_gmt":"2025-10-11T05:24:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/204716\/"},"modified":"2025-10-11T05:24:09","modified_gmt":"2025-10-11T05:24:09","slug":"the-delightful-smutty-world-of-jilly-cooper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/204716\/","title":{"rendered":"The delightful, smutty world of Jilly Cooper"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe \u2018Queen of the Bonkbusters\u2019 is dead,\u201d said Rowan Pelling in The Independent<\/a>. And millions are mourning a woman who was not just the author of a string of bestselling books, but also \u201ca symbol of something profoundly British and endlessly comforting\u201d.<\/p>\n

From her home in rural Gloucestershire, Jilly Cooper conjured a captivating world of rolling hills, faithful hounds, Agas, \u201ccocktail hours, rogues called Rupert, sweet girls called Taggy, al fresco orgasms and laughing in bed\u201d. The writer Caitlin Moran \u2013 who fell for Cooper\u2019s novels while growing up on a council estate in Wolverhampton \u2013 once described it as \u201cSex Narnia\u201d. The dogs, horses and other animals in Cooper Land don\u2019t talk, of course, but they are as carefully drawn as her human characters, \u201cand their deaths often more tearjerking\u201d.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

As for the sex, there is an awful lot of it, which made her books, including the early romances with posh girls\u2019 names \u2013 Harriet, Octavia etc. \u2013 the \u201cultimate contraband at girls\u2019 schools in the 1970s and 1980s\u201d. But Cooper was the \u201cMrs Kipling of sex\u201d: it was naughty but nice, and written with mischievous humour.<\/p>\n

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\u2018Brilliant energy\u2019<\/p>\n

The word \u201cbonkbuster<\/a>\u201d conveys the Rutshire books\u2019 focus on sex and their \u201cjoyfulness\u201d, said Olivia Laing in The Guardian<\/a> \u2013 but \u201cit doesn\u2019t quite do justice to their wit and complexity as social comedy, let alone the beadiness of Jilly\u2019s eye on class, her knack for satirising selfishness and pretension, and her gift for understanding loneliness and isolation\u201d.<\/p>\n

There were ice queens in her world, but her heroines tended to be warm-hearted \u201cugly ducklings\u201d; her characters soldiered on through their darker times; and holding it all together was a \u201crich connective tissue composed of lovely landscape writing, social satire, silly jokes, highbrow quotations\u2026 and endless puns\u201d. With their \u201cbrilliant energy\u201d, comedy, fresh observation and fascination with social nuance, these novels fit within a literary tradition, said Philip Hensher in The Spectator. They have already lasted 40 years, far longer than is normal for bestsellers; I wouldn\u2019t be surprised if they became classics.<\/p>\n

Grateful for life<\/p>\n

Yet being a Jilly fan was never just about the books, said Sarah Vine in the Daily Mail<\/a>. It was also about her. Ever-smiling, she was famously fun and strikingly generous with her time; she was kind to everyone, supportive of other writers, and brave too.<\/p>\n

In 1990, it emerged that her husband, Leo, had had a long affair; it broke her heart but she opted to forgive him, and then nursed him through his final years. She never stopped being grateful for her life.<\/p>\n

A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day \u2013 and the best features from TheWeek.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cThe \u2018Queen of the Bonkbusters\u2019 is dead,\u201d said Rowan Pelling in The Independent. And millions are mourning a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":204717,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[64,63,457,134],"class_list":["post-204716","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-books","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-books","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204716","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=204716"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204716\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/204717"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=204716"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=204716"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=204716"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}