British author Jilly Cooper, known for her unapologetically raunchy romance novels, has died at the age of 88 following a fall, her agent and family said on Monday.
A former journalist, Cooper penned the best-selling series of romantic novels known as The Rutshire Chronicles, which included “Rivals” recently adapted for television by Disney+.
Cooper’s publishing house Curtis Brown said in a statement that the writer, who was a friend of the UK’s Queen Camilla, had died “on Sunday morning, after a fall”.
British Conservative former prime minister Rishi Sunak professed himself “a genuine fan” in 2023, adding: “You have to have escapism in your life.”
“Jilly may have worn her influence lightly but she was a true trailblazer,” her publisher Bill Scott-Kerr said in a statement.
He praised her novels as “a winning combination of glorious storytelling, wicked social commentary and deft, lacerating characterisation”.
Cooper was born Jill Sallitt on February 21, 1937.
She said in an interview ahead of the Disney+ release: “People like love stories to cheer them up. And that’s what I’ve always wanted to do: cheer people up.”
Her best-selling novels were famously filled with sex, snobbery and fun, and boasted suggestive titles such as “Tackle!”, “Mount!” and “Score!”.
“(Cooper) dissected the behaviour, bad mostly, of the English upper middle classes with the sharpest of scalpels,” Scott-Kerr said, adding that “Riders” had “changed the course of popular fiction forever”.
Cooper’s children, Felix and Emily, said their mother’s “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,” they said in a statement.
Credit: AFP
