Dame Jilly Cooper, at 87, retains an insatiable curiosity and love for gossip. We spend an hour together in a hotel room â no, not like that! â and she machine-guns questions at me throughout: âWhat time do you go to bed?â âDid you play rugger at school?â âWhat did you vote? Are you pleased with them?â âDo you have a dog? Do you want one?â âDo you have a nice wife?â Most of these inquiries are easy enough to answer or deflect, but one leaves me genuinely slack-jawed: âAre you good in bed?â
Cooperâs occasionally profane asides are made more incongruous by the fact they are delivered by a sweet, twinkly eyed octogenarian whose feet dangle from the plump sofa on which she sits. And, as you would expect from the author of books titled Riders, Score!, Mount! and Tackle!, her love of a double-entendre knows few bounds. When I make reference to using my Dictaphone, she snickers, elongating the syllables: âDic-ta-phone! Thatâs a good word.â
Our meeting was supposed to be about me posing the questions, too. Her 1988 novel Rivals, which features the second appearance of her dastardly antihero Rupert Campbell-Black and which most Cooper scholars consider her magnum opus, has now been made into a lavish, eight-part, sex-and-shoulder-pads . Alex Hassell (from His Dark Materials) plays Campbell-Black, the former champion showjumper and now Tory MP and sports minister under Margaret Thatcher; on the other side of the rivalry is David Tennantâs Tony Baddingham, who has played second fiddle to Campbell-Black for years (he went to a grammar school for chrissakes!) but is now a powerful, vengeful TV boss. A fun, knockabout cast is rounded out by Aidan Turner as the Parkinson-meets-Paxman interviewer Declan OâHara, Danny Dyer, Katherine Parkinson, and new-ish-comer Bella Maclean as Taggie, OâHaraâs daughter and the pure heart of the story.
To mark the occasion, Cooper â who is an executive producer on the series, but who had a light touch (three set visits) on the production â agreed to take on the Observerâs You Ask the Questions, made up of submissions from cultural figures and readers. âIâm terrified,â she says, when I give her a preview of her celebrity interlocutors, who include Oscar winner Emerald Fennell, writer and director of Saltburn, actor Gillian Anderson, Bridget Jones author Helen Fielding, and â checks and rechecks notes â Arsenal stalwart Tony Adams. âHow did you get all these people to do this?â says Cooper at one point, astonished and touched.
The truth is, though, that Cooper has been gradually ascending to national treasure status. For years, even decades, her books, which have sold more than 11m copies in the UK alone, were dismissed as smutty bonkbusters or, perhaps even worse, relegated to that damning category of âguilty pleasuresâ. This was the phrase used by Rishi Sunak, a self-professed Cooper completist, to describe his admiration. âIâm a genuine fan,â he said in 2023. âYou need to have escapism in your life.â
The assumption, it seems, is that as an author in Britain you canât be credible and wildly successful. Cooper herself spelled it out in a famous quote: âThe literary world is divided into two sets: people like me who long for a kind word in the Guardian and people in the Guardian who long for my sales.â
Does she still think thatâs the case? âA bit,â she replies.
âGod, I hate the phrase guilty pleasures,â says Olivia Laing, the novelist and cultural critic, who supplied one of the questions for Cooper. âWhatâs there to be guilty about? Sheâs a genius at description, sheâs amazing at class and social comedy, she understands the complexities of desire. Letâs put her somewhere between Nancy Mitford and Trollope, with a lot more sex lobbed in. I think young people will go absolutely wild for Rivals, which I think is her masterpiece, with exactly the right scale of cast and plot. The clothes! The drama! The dogs!â
Laing is not alone in finding unanticipated depth in Cooperâs work. In 2017, the poet and academic Ian Patterson (who is also Laingâs husband) wrote a long appreciation of her in the London Review of Books in which he detailed âsubplots worthy of Dickensâ and a fondness for wordplay that called to mind Ali Smith. The journalist Caitlin Moran, who changed her first name as a teenager to honour a character in Rivals, and also poses a question here, recently wrote: âI genuinely think Jilly Cooper is the Jane Austen of our times.â With her predilection for domineering men, and her plots rooted in rural, upper-class privilege, it would be a stretch to describe Cooper as a feminist or a social realist, but sheâs been a pioneer in certain regards: Riders, which in 1985 launched the 11-part novel series that became known as the Rutshire Chronicles, is said to be the first popular novel to espouse the use of vibrators.
Beyond the admiration for her writing, Cooper, who is flirty and quite frankly a riot, clearly inspires deep affection from those who cross her path. Many of the juiciest stories stem from the famous parties she throws at her 14th-century home in the Cotswolds. But Cooper notes that her capacity for socialising has diminished these days, especially since 2013 when her husband of 53 years, Leo, died after more than a decade living with Parkinsonâs. âBecause now Iâm an old bid, living in Gloucester, thereâs less,â she says sadly.
Photograph: John Walters/Daily Mail/REX
âShe is the best,â says Laing, who first met Cooper at a lunch that involved at a âconservative estimateâ 11 bottles of champagne. âSheâs so kind â sends Valentines and Advent calendars to probably hundreds of people, but it always thrills me. Sheâs incredibly joyful and mischievous and curious. Great fun. And very supportive to other writers.â
Disney+ clearly hopes that Rivals can find a new generation of Cooper enthusiasts, perhaps already hooked on 1980s nostalgia. The series is very much in the spirit of the book: fun, titillating and glamorous; sometimes silly, but also at times deceptively insightful and witty. Classic scenes, such as the naked tennis match, where Campbell-Black first meets Taggie, are faithfully rendered. There is a question of why it has taken so long to transfer to the screen. âI think people thought it was so long and it was too difficult to make,â replies Cooper. âThey would look at 800 pages and think: âHow can we make a film out of that?â
âBut Iâm thrilled,â Cooper goes on. âItâs got this fantastic cast of gorgeous men, and fantastically pretty girls⦠lots of desirability in it now. Itâs very sexy, but itâs very well-acted too. One day we had a party at my house, which was lovely. They all came and they all got on very well, which was amazing too, because they donât usually. Men get very jealous of one another, but they didnât in this, they all liked one another.â
For Cooper, she will be happy if Rivals offers some succour as the nights draw in and we come to terms with fresh belt-tightening under Keir Starmerâs government (a development that clearly concerns her). âMost television now is all crimes and murders,â she says. âPeople like love stories to cheer them up. And thatâs what Iâve always wanted to do: cheer people up.â
Ian Rankin
Author
Your books have given so much pleasure to so many readers over the years that Iâm sure you wouldnât swap that success for a Booker prize (or two). But if an abductor locked you away and compelled you to write a novel to sway the Booker judges, what do you think its theme and plot would be?
God, itâs difficult. Because Ian doesnât do Booker prize books, does he? And heâs always been lovely about my book Rivals. The Booker prize â well, Iâm trying to write a novel about Sparta at the moment. So everywhere in Greece, if you committed adultery, you were killed. Not killed, but terrible things happened to you, because you were destroying the family. But in Sparta, it was OK. You were allowed to commit as much adultery as you liked, which I thought was quite interesting in ancient times.
So I thought Iâd have a modern person, a lovely hero called David Dartford, and he and his friend go to Sparta to make a film today, and they have a competition to see who can commit the most adultery. Thatâs as far as Iâve got. Do you think that would win the Booker prize? Do you think they would like that? But I donât really mind about Booker prizes: Iâd love one, Iâd adore one, but Iâve had the odd little prize.
David Tennant
Actor
Dear Jilly, your characters manage to be both very sophisticated and at the absolute mercy of their basest instincts. Which do you believe to be the most powerful pull on human nature: money, sex or power?
Oh, gosh. If youâre passionately in love it would be sex, wouldnât it? It really would. But I think sex less now. People are all going jogging, arenât they? Running. Everybody runs miles and miles and miles and I donât think thereâs so much sex now. So actually I think itâs money. Everybody wants money because theyâre very, very worried whatâs going to happen with the government and whether Putin is going to bomb us. We just want a few bob, so money is motivating people quite a lot now.
Caitlin Moran
Author
The biggest question of all, really: why do you still write? Youâve been Dameâd, you are universally loved, youâve sold 11m books, your characters live in the heads of millions â many of them masturbating while they think about themâ¦
What about that then? You canât have that in your newspaper. âMistress-baitingâ, I call it. I think mistress-baiting is better. But I write because thatâs what I do. When I get home tonight, Iâll write in my diary about today: an 87-year-oldâs aspect of life is as interesting as an 18-year-oldâs. So thatâs what I do for a living. Iâm going to try to write another book, but I might not be able to finish one. But I think I might try.
Iâve kept a diary for years. The earlier diaries are very, very over the top really, they are quite naughty. And I say to my children [about publishing them]: âDarling, would you like to be rich and embarrassed or poor and safe?â And they say: âRich and embarrassed.â
Iâve been ploughing through the Rutshire Chronicles and wanted to know who your literary influences were â in Rupert Campbell-Blackâs dialogue, I sensed a lot of Oscar Wilde.
Seb Tiley, Frampton Mansell, Gloucestershire
Oscar Wildeâs a wonderful writer, and very funny. I hope Iâm quite funny too. But hmm, I donât think so, no. I read an awful lot of things: Anthony Powell, gorgeous, I met him. I met John Betjeman, too. Iâm reading The Odyssey at the moment, because of Sparta.
Elizabeth Hurley
Actor and model
With whom would you prefer to spend a dirty weekend: Rupert Campbell-Black, Jake Lovell [from Riders], Rannaldini [from Score!] or Declan OâHara?
Oooh Rupert, I think. Declan is all in love with his wife. One of my favourite bits in Rivals is when Declan and his wife have a row, sheâs very upset, and they go to bed in the middle of a party. And their daughter takes the sign off the ladies and puts it on the door saying: âPlease do not disturb. Sex in progress.â So I donât think Declan would be unfaithful to Maud.
Rannaldini would be very good in bed, but he was so nasty. He was a conductor, and no, he was not a nice man. I wouldnât have liked him very much. Heâd have probably told the press immediately or done something awful. And I love Jake Lovell; Jake would have been lovely in bed, but Iâd like to meet Rupert, so Iâd rather go to bed with Rupert. But I love Taggie and that would mean him being unfaithful to her, so perhaps Iâd better go to bed with Jake.
Emerald Fennell
Actor and film-maker
Which fictional character do you most fancy (excluding your own!)?
Darcy, of course. Darcys arenât allowed to exist now: he was handsome and arrogant and rich and all those things. And he went around like a knight rescuing Elizabeth and looking after her family and he was very discreet about it, he didnât boast. So he would be lovely, I wouldnât kick him out.
About 20 years ago, me and some friends were on a walking holiday in Gloucestershire and spotted you from a distance in the village of Bisley. I was tempted to shout a greeting of recognition, but thought it may seem rude. Whatâs your general attitude to being recognised in public?
Paul Greaves, Mexborough, South Yorkshire
What Iâm allergic to, more than anything else, is droppers-in. Hate droppers-in. You are just in the middle of a really good paragraph, and someone bangs on the door and wants to come and talk to you. But people donât recognise me as much as they used to and itâs very nice when people come and say hello. Itâs an honour, isnât it? If somebody had come up in the street to me in Bisley, Iâd have been thrilled.
Should anyone who isnât a dog person occupy any kind of important public office? Or can they simply not be trusted? I canât recall any of the proper baddies in your books having dogs!
Nicola Dunn, Scotland
Dogs are absolutely essential. Heaven. Dogs are the best thing in the world. And baddies, of course, they donât have dogs. Rupert was a bit cruel to his horses in Riders, but no, cruelty to animals is the worst thing in the world, awful. I donât have a dog at the moment. When I was finishing Tackle!, Bluebell, my greyhound, died. Then I had to rewrite Tackle! for a year, so I was busy doing that. When you rescue a dog, youâve got to give it at least three months attention to settle it in and Iâve got so much going on at the moment.
Balli Kaur Jaswal
Novelist
You finished rewriting Riders 14 years after losing the original draft on a London bus. Iâm curious about how this lapse of time contributed to the rewrite. Were there shifts in the social and cultural landscape within those years that influenced your writing?
I donât think it was 14 years, I lost it on the bus much later, sometime in the late 70s, and it was awful. Can you imagine? Iâd written thousands of words of it and I took it out to lunch just to tidy up the characters or put a bit in. And, of course, I went and got a bit drunk, and I went to Selfridges and bought some scent, and got on the 22 bus. When I got home, it had gone.
I canât even remember who I had lunch with. Is that Freudian? No, we didnât do anything else because I went to Selfridges and came home. But it was a much better book by the end, because I concentrated on the characters and I made Jake develop more, Rupert develop more. I just spent longer on it. And there was more sex.
Helen Fielding
Author
Did you have fun working in newspapers â and did that help form your voice?
I loved working in newspapers. When I left school, I went on a paper called the Middlesex Independent. I used to go to the fire brigade, then I used to go to talk to the police, and they used to take me out for drinks. Then I would go somewhere else, to a fete. Then I moved on to nothing. I got sacked from 24 jobs after that: temporary typist and things like that, awful jobs. Then I got a job in publishing. And then I went on to the Sunday Times which was lovely, miraculous really, because Harry Evans [the editor] just let me write whatever I wanted to. I was miraculously lucky.
The first piece I wrote was saying how I hated going away for the weekend from London. I was terribly rude about people. I said, âWhat should I write about next week?â and Harry Evans said: âThere were so many furious letters we are filling your next weekâs column with furious letters.â But the access to be able to go and interview anybody you wanted to â Thatcher and people like that â was fascinating.
How the hell did you balance young children with writing?
Emily Bryce-Perkins, London
Well I adopted children, so I didnât have to go through all that pregnancy lark. I got my Sunday Times column almost the same time Felix came, so I was frantically writing that, looking after Felix, in love with this gorgeous baby, and Leo was very helpful. Emily came along three years later, by that time we had a nanny. Our nannies were always very very pretty girls and lovely. They were friends and we all lived together in Fulham. We had bad nannies and good nannies. We would come back and find nanny in bed with the milkman or something, and the children upstairs still playing and things like that. So it was pretty chaotic, but good copy.
I love your politically incorrect characters â theyâre usually the most brilliant â but if you wrote a more Observer-y character, what would you choose to write?
Sophie Venables, Southsea
Well, what about Declan in Rivals? Declan OâHara is completely Observer. Heâs left wing, he comes from humble origins in Ireland and he loves Yeats. Thatâs sort of Observer, isnât it? And heâs very moral, heâs a very honourable man. When they [Rupert Campbell-Black and Tony Baddingham] start fighting for the franchise, he wonât cheat. Heâs an Observer man.
Prue Leith
Restaurateur and TV presenter
What got you campaigning for a memorial statue for Animals in War? And were you happy with the eventual statue?
I was asked. My husband published military history and I was very pleased that the Imperial War Museum took me out to lunch and asked, would I like to write a book about the role animals played in war? So I thought: âGod, how lovely.â But of course it was a nightmare to write because it was the saddest book ever. About 8m horses died in the first world war, the poor dogs, the camels. The cruelty was appalling, and the suffering.
But there were good bits, which I liked writing about. And when I finished it, lots of people came along and said: âWhy donât we build a sculpture in Hyde Park?â So we raised the money for it â Andrew Parker Bowles and lots of people. And the statue is lovely so Iâm very proud. People say Iâm a silly old pop writer, a steamy romanticist. That was a serious book, wasnât it?
Alison Hammond
TV presenter
In Rivals, the world of ruthless TV execs and scandalous love lives makes for some wild stories. Did you ever have to fend off a scheming rival in real life, or were your personal âboardroom battlesâ settled with a bottle of champagne and some well-aimed wit?
Oh yes, when I was working on the Sunday Times, a journalist came up to me and said that everybody thought my column was awful and why didnât I give it to her? I worried about it, and I asked my husband, did he think I was that bad? But no, it was completely untrue and I just wrote the next piece. And Harry Evans didnât fire me.
Which [of your] characters most closely resembles you?
Observer reader
Oh, gosh, Lizzie in Rivals. Lizzie is a very messy writer and lives down by the lake, sheâs a bit like me. She loves her animals and sheâs naughty. But I donât think anybody could be so hopeless as me really.
Do you consider your books being called âbonkbustersâ complimentary or denigrating?
YorkshireExPat
Itâs funny. Itâs hysterical. I donât really worry about bonkbusters. But someone described them once as âsteamy romancesâ and I thought that was ghastly. Steamy romance, no. Something like Rivals, thereâs so much more.
Olivia Laing
Author
Dearest Jilly, you are widely regarded as the nicest, most generous of writers. How have you managed to maintain that openness and kindness in what can be the tough world of publishing?
Iâm probably beastly behind peopleâs backs. I try not to be beastly to their faces. But no, I was married to a publisher, Leo, who died in 2013. When I gave him a Sunday Times piece to read, heâd say: âThatâs crap, darling. Go back and write it again.â So I had a judge at home. But also if anybody was horrible to me he would come in and say: âStop it. Donât be horrible to my wife.â So I was protected. Lucky.
Iâve loved your books for so long, your characters just jump off the page. Where do you get the inspiration for their fabulous names?
Gil Bailey, Brighton
Oh gosh, I donât know. I have to be careful, because with Rivals, Tony Baddingham was called Bullingham originally and there was somebody who thought it was him. But Baddingham is much better. Heâs a nasty, nasty piece of work. But that was a good joke in the book, it said he was a devil, he had a forked tongue and thatâs why he was so good at oral sex. Dare you to put that in!
Gillian Anderson
Actor
Youâve said your big break came in 1969 when the Sunday Times published your piece on being a hopelessly undomesticated young wife. If you were going to write something today, to have the same effect, what would it be about?
Tricky that, isnât it? Iâm a hopelessly undomesticated geriatric these days. I met somebody the other day who suddenly got a new man at 89 after her husband died, and she had her first orgasm at 89. It was absolutely wonderful. Thatâd be quite an amazing thing to write about. That would get people going.
Tony Adams
Former football player and manager
Why havenât you invited me to play naked tennis? Love Tony.
Itâs a very naughty book Rivals, thereâs lots going on, nude tennis and all sorts. Weâve got a tennis court at home; weâve never done it, though. Itâs the worst tennis court youâve ever, ever seen, itâs complete chaos, Iâve just let it go to seed. But Tonyâs absolutely gorgeous and he has a beautiful wife and they live locally in a heavenly house, and theyâre really, really nice.
As a teenager, most of my knowledge about women came from Joni Mitchell records and Jilly Cooper novels. It wasnât a bad education. What pieces of literature/art/music were most formative for you as a human being and as a writer?
Michael, Yorkshire
Anthony Powell, Proust, Beatrix Potter. Music, itâs Beethoven, Brahms. I lost my virginity to Brahms Symphony No 2. Yes, I did, thatâs good, isnât it? Art, I like Stubbs and horse pictures. Iâve got lots of pictures at home⦠Christ, I donât want to get burgled so Iâd better shut up.
Victoria Coren Mitchell
Author and TV presenter
I donât think Iâve ever found a book I enjoyed more than your sparkling early romances â Imogen, Emily, Prudence and so on. There are photos of beautiful women on all the covers. As a child, I was told that they were all you, wearing different hats and makeup. To this day, I stare at those covers a few times a year and can never work it out. Is it you?
It was me! Makeup artists, I think, are the Raphaels or Stubbsâ of the modern world. They could transform boots into absolutely amazing beauties. And I had a marvellous makeup person. I looked like the heroine of each of them and they just made me up different, which is amazing. And I was put on the front. That was a long time ago, in the 1970s, when I was very young. But theyâre sweet stories, they have very happy endings, too. I love happy endings.
Sara Cox
BBC Radio 2 presenter and novelist
I love being around horsey people â theyâre a real breed of their own so Iâve always loved your books! I have an Irish sports horse now and have ridden since I was tiny. What is it about these magnificent animals and the folk that inhabit the equestrian world that inspires and fascinates you?
When I was a child, we went to stay in Cornwall, first holiday after the war. We got down there and there was a sweet pony called Rufus. I was mad about ponies, and I persuaded my parents to buy it for me. We were living in Cobham, Surrey, and I said to all my friends at school: âCome on, my ponyâs arriving today, youâve all got to come and meet Rufus.â I was terribly up myself.
Anyway, I went home, and there was Rufus in the field. So I opened the gates: âRufus! Rufus!â And this pony rushed up and bit me all over. Really badly bit me. I was in floods, and so Rufus was sold. Rufus was then properly gelded.
When we got to Yorkshire, I got a pony called Willow. Willow was the complete love of my life, and did very well in shows. But when I was about 13, 14, I was at the Pony Club and this girl couldnât get her horse Geldy â awful name â over the jumps, so I said: âGet off, Iâll get her over the parallel bars.â I got on to Geldy â trot, trot, trot â and Geldy stopped. I went into the parallel bars and dislocated my arm, which trapped the nerve. I was in hospital for a month or so, and I was paralysed for a long time and couldnât ride. I could never get my nerve back, so I couldnât showjump any more, and I suppose I wrote Riders and Rivals to make up for it. [As Proust wrote] âThe true paradises are the paradises that we have lost.â
I live half a mile from you but have never seen you in Morrisons or Aldi. Do you use Waitrose, which is further away?
Andy Ferrari, Amberley, West Sussex
No, I use Tesco. Mr Tesco delivers to our house. I havenât been to Morrisons. Somebody else does my shopping for me because Iâm so old.
Poppy Jay
Presenter of the Brown Girls Do It Too podcast
If you could go back in time and give 25-year-old Jilly sex advice, what would you say?
Sex advice at 25? Well, I got married at 24, and I married a husband whoâd been married before and was extremely good in bed. Leo was absolutely wonderful and he gave me all the advice I needed, really. Sometimes I probably read too late and didnât come to bed when he wanted to go to bed, but I canât really think of any advice Iâd give myself.
Jilly, I have loved you since I got hold of my mumâs copy of Rivals when I was about 12! Thank you for the wonderful stories, especially Imogen, which I still reread every year on the beach in France. As one of those sandal-wearing lefties, can I ask what you have against us? Weâre not all terrible wishy-washy folk who never wash!
Nic Jones, Brighton
No, no! Weâve had Declan. And in Tackle!, Elijah, my hero, is a lovely lefty. No, I didnât mean to be beastly about them. I love lefties, I went on the Aldermaston march [against nuclear weapons] when I was young. And I voted socialist for a long time, and then I sort of levelled up and voted Tory later.
If you could sum up your books as a dish, what would it be?
Louise McCahery, Belgium
Yes, yes, yes! Coq au vin! Thereâs cock, lots of sex, and drinking!
