Best-selling author of Rivals and Riders dies at 88

Novelist Dame Jilly Cooper, known for her best-selling books including Rivals and Riders, has died at the age of 88.

Dame Jilly’s most successful works were The Rutshire Chronicles, beginning with Riders in 1985, which portrayed the scandals, sex lives and social circles of the wealthy horse-loving country set.

Follow-up Rivals was published in 1988 and was turned into a hit Disney+ TV series last year. She sold more than 11 million books in total in the UK alone.

Queen Camilla led the tributes, describing Dame Jilly as a legend and a “wonderfully witty and compassionate friend to me and so many”, adding: “May her hereafter be filled with impossibly handsome men and devoted dogs.”

The author, who lived in Gloucestershire, died on Sunday morning after a fall.

In a statement, her children Felix and Emily said: “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.”

In her statement, the Queen said she was “so saddened” to learn of Dame Jilly’s death.

“Very few writers get to be a legend in their own lifetime but Jilly was one, creating a whole new genre of literature and making it her own through a career that spanned over five decades,” she said.

Dame Jilly was, “as ever, a star of the show” at the Queen’s Reading Room Festival just three weeks ago, she said.

She added: “I join my husband The King in sending our thoughts and sympathies to all her family.”

Dame Jilly’s agent Felicity Blunt remeberend the writer as “emotionally intelligent, fantastically generous, sharply observant and utter fun”.

Blunt added: “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.”

Dame Jilly started her career as a journalist before publishing her first book – a guide called How To Stay Married – in 1969.

She remained married to husband Leo from 1961 until his death in 2013.

Her writing career took off with further astute and humorous non-fiction guides to men, women and the class system, alongside a series of romance novels.

She combined all of her favourite subjects to create the heady formula for The Rutshire Chronicles, which ran to 11 novels in total. She returned to the series for a final instalment, Tackle, in 2023.

“Jilly may have worn her influence lightly but she was a true trailblazer,” her publisher Bill Scott-Kerr said.

“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 ten 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.”

Others paying tribute included comedian Helen Lederer, who wrote on X: “Trail blazer, wit, optimist and the giver of the greatest summer parties – you made it look simple.”

Broadcaster Gyles Brandreth wrote that she was “simply adorable”.

“Brilliant, beautiful, funny (so funny), sexy (so sexy!), the best company, the most generous & thoughtful & kind-hearted friend,” he said.

“Jilly Cooper brought sunshine & laughter into the world. And she could write a sizzler of a story. What a lady! What a life! RIP.”

TV presenter Kirstie Allsopp said she was “a British institution, funny, enthusiastic and self deprecating, we don’t see enough of it these days”.

Piers Morgan posted: “Such a fabulously fun, mischievous, warm-heated lady. If she was in a room, everyone would feel instantly cheerier.”

Former Sky News presenter Kay Burley admitted that the Rutshire Chronicles’ dashing anti-hero Rupert Campbell-Black “had quite the influence on my early 20s”.

Fellow broadcaster Russell Grant said: “Jilly was one of the most kind, courteous, generous, warm-hearted and smiley people I ever met when I worked on breakfast and morning TV.”

Author and former doctor Adam Kay recalled being her “perhaps unlikely penpal”, adding: “We have lost one of the greats.”

The executive producers of the Disney+ adaptation of Rivals, Dominic Treadwell-Collins and Alex Lamb, recalled their time working with “one of the world’s greatest storytellers”.

“Crawling around on her sitting room floor with storylines on pieces of paper, sitting up late at her kitchen table holding hands with love and our tummies with laughter, receiving scoldings and heaps of wisdom in equal measure, watching her eyes sparkling as she sat behind the monitor on set watching Rutshire brought to life – every moment spent with Jilly Cooper was bloody marvellous,” they said.

Cooper’s funeral will be a private, family occasion, her agent says.

But a public service of thanksgiving will be held at Southwark Cathedral in London at some point in the next few months.

An announcement on the arrangements for that will be made in due course.