Novelist Jilly Cooper: ‘She did for the Cotswolds what Jane Austen did for Bath’

‘A country girl at heart’ is how Jilly Cooper’s literary agent, Felicity Blunt, describes her friend. The late British novelist delighted her readers with tales of the upper middle classes bed-hopping their way through family feuds, shady business deals and romantic entanglements. The writer often used the English landscape to create drama in her books: the orange leaves falling drowsily onto woodland paths, or a dewy cobweb between the branches of a beech tree, were good indicators of the passion to come. ‘It was like she was peeling back the layers of country life to see what was thrumming beneath,’ says Blunt.

Born in 1937, Cooper began her writing career as a journalist before moving into fiction. Her heyday was the 1980s, in the Thatcherite interlude between the miners’ strike and Cool Britannia, when unrestrained free-market capitalism created the perfect backdrop for her self-made millionaires, gorgeously amoral aristocrats and country wives with hearts of gold. Their exploits were cocooned in luxury: the sheets were satin, the scent Chanel and the glasses filled with Dom Pérignon; but there was always a muddy dog, a spluttering Volvo or a wilful child to tarnish the silver.

Her most successful books were those recently adapted for the TV series Rivals. Set in fictional Rutshire, the novels are loosely based on Cooper’s beloved corner of the English countryside, the Cotswolds. The writer lived in Bisley, a village of narrow lanes set on a limestone plateau and surrounded by ancient woodland. Blunt recalls Cooper’s yellow-stone house as warm and welcoming, filled with grandchildren, animals and paintings.

Cooper and her husband Leo began collecting art in the 1960s, with the writer recalling that she bought her first painting — a Betty Usman for £15 — after getting drunk at a party. ‘When I sobered up, I didn’t know how I was going to survive until my next pay cheque,’ she said. They carried on buying until they ran out of room, saying it was ‘much more fun than stocks and shares’.

On 22 October 2026, property from Jilly Cooper’s collection will be offered in the Modern British and Irish Art Day Sale at Christie’s in London. There are drawings by Charles Sargeant Jagger, John Minton and C.R.W. Nevinson, a watercolour by John Nash, and one of Cooper’s favourite paintings, Diana in the Corn (circa 1932), by William Nicholson, depicting Winston Churchill’s granddaughter.

Cooper saw herself primarily as an entertainer and social observer. Her sole aim, she said, was ‘to add to the sum of human happiness’. That’s the way she wrote: to entertain, to divert, and because she loved it.

Felicity Blunt on Dame Jilly Cooper

‘I first met Jilly at a book launch when I was Vivienne Schuster’s assistant at the literary agency Curtis Brown. Jilly always had two book launches, one in London and one in Bisley, and the latter was always more riotous, the house packed with people — it was just like the parties in her books.

‘She was so lovely to me. Vivienne and I stayed longer than anyone else, finishing the last bottle of wine around her kitchen table. She was the most wonderful interrogator, there was nothing she couldn’t get out of you. I remember that after one particular dinner party during the filming of Rivals — with the writers Laura Wade and Dominic Treadwell-Collins, and actor Alex Hassell — I woke up the next morning and thought, “Oh no, is she going to use this in one of her books?” She never forgot anything.

‘Jilly was resolutely analogue, so I would email through her assistant and she would reply on her typewriter. When Vivienne retired, there was absolutely no way I wasn’t going to represent Jilly. She was incredibly gracious about it, particularly given that she knew so much more than I did and had been working in publishing for decades. She was the best collaborator: thoughtful, insightful and always grateful. It’s very rare to meet somebody who thanks you for the small things. I imagine half of England must have received thank-you cards from Jilly.

‘She was a country girl at heart and an assiduous recorder of the seasons. She kept diaries for decades, marking the changing year. She used to say you couldn’t really imagine in October what spring felt like, because you forget so quickly. I think she was fascinated by the passing of time and by the way nature marks it. She knew so much about flowers. She was interested in nature, but equally in art, and always studied her subjects incredibly deeply.

‘What is fascinating about her books is that you have these rich and outrageous characters escaping the city and being given the space to play in the countryside. There’s something very different about that kind of community: you can have neighbours without being on top of them, seeing people across the valley rather than living right next door. That sense of freedom and space lent itself incredibly well to her books. She did for the Cotswolds what Jane Austen did for Bath. She had an acute observational eye, could make you laugh, and could also be quite cutting.

‘People sometimes misunderstood her books, assuming they were easy or two-dimensional. In fact, they are exceptionally well plotted, thoughtful and complex. They are like a Gordian knot. It’s incredibly rare to find somebody who was that brilliant at plotting and also that astute about people. She loved Shakespeare and Dickens, and of course Rivals is a kind of Midsummer Night’s Dream.

‘She understood class extraordinarily well. She could look at somebody and understand whether they had got it wrong, whether they were trying to move up socially, or whether they were comfortable with themselves. And she did it with enormous humour and affection, partly because she was willing to send herself up as well. She once described herself as “lower middle pretending to be upper”, which I think is wonderfully revealing.

‘Her favourite character in Rivals was Rupert Campbell-Black, a former Olympic showjumper turned Tory MP. She never made a secret of it — I think he had a lot of her husband Leo in him. Leo was outrageously funny, he could make her roar with laughter, and of course the animals were central to both of them. She was a passionate campaigner who hated cruelty to animals. She rescued greyhounds. Her house was filled with pictures of her dogs and horses.

‘As for the criticism she received early in her career, she said that it made her absolutely determined that the next book would be better. And she had the last laugh: her books are still being read decades later.

‘She had this wonderful ability to make you feel special. She could make somebody feel intelligent, beautiful, thoughtful or simply remarkable. Because she always noticed you, you felt remarkable around her. I miss that version of myself, I can’t deny it. I feel increasingly less remarkable since she’s gone.’

The Modern British and Irish Art Day Sale is on view from 17 to 21 October 2026 at Christie’s in London, alongside the Modern British and Irish Art Evening Sale