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Remembering Jilly Cooper
Felicity Blunt, literary agent at Curtis Brown, remembers her friend and client, the bestselling author Jilly Cooper.
Jilly Cooper understood intimacy better than anyone, not just between her characters, but with her readers. She spun her own life through her books, which were peppered with words like “orgasmic”, “heavenly” and “ravishing” but delivered sharp-witted insights into marriage, rivalry, fertility and infidelity. It’s why there was such collective sadness at her passing – whether you had met her or not, she was a much-loved friend and mentor.
I consider myself infinitely blessed that I worked with Jilly Cooper for the last 10 years of her life. She was my Taylor Swift and I had loved her from the moment I first read her back in 1991, when I had spotted the hardcover of Riders, emblazoned with a blonde in jodhpurs astride a grey horse, face out on a shelf in Roehampton Library. This edition, (published by Arlington Books, the publishing house of her then agent Desmond Elliott), looked innocuous enough that my mother let me take it home. Had it been the infamous Transworld edition she may have demurred, I was after all only 10. When my mother clocked that the content was possibly inappropriate and tried to confiscate the book, I protested shrilly that I was only interested in the horsey bits, assuring her I had skipped the ruder bits. Well, no.
In the remembrances of Jilly it was a common theme that her books had been both entertainment and sex education to generations of women. In classrooms throughout the UK, her novels were passed through hot eager hands, each of us delighting in her acuity and the wonderfully inappropriate liaisons. Indeed, they were banned at her own daughter’s school, until she tartly pointed out that her sales paid the fees and the embargo was swiftly lifted. Jilly delighted in the jodhpur-clad bottom that adorned the Riders paperback, and the hand that rested so comfortably in its gluteal cleft. She didn’t protest the label “bonkbuster”, which other authors would have rubbed against, just airily observed that many a well-reviewed literary writer might have preferred her sales.
She was infinitely better read than the covers of her books implied, wore her knowledge lightly but enjoyed punctuating her texts and conversations with the poetry of Shakespeare and Yeats. People might have come to her work because of the promise of something salacious, but the books proved to be meticulously researched, brilliantly plotted and enriched with a literary layer that made you feel like you had devoured something substantive on finishing.
Yes, the settings were glamorous and the world aspirational, but the small acute moments, captured in crystalline prose, were reassuringly relatable: a first date and no razor with which to tackle your legs, a meal gone horrifically awry as the in-laws descend, a woman’s heart shattered by infidelity while her children merrily rip into their Christmas presents. We lived it all with Jilly, the everyday and the extraordinary.
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A night owl, she would labour late into the night, researching, reviewing, writing. “Jilly,” we would beg, “it can wait.” But we realise now, it couldn’t; we had less time than we thought.
I remember her at read-throughs for the Disney+ adaptation of Rivals, listening to the dialogue, scrawling notes over her scripts. Clapping her hands if she loved something, declaring off-puttingly loudly “NO” on the rare occasion she did not. (We took all her notes!) A journalist through and through, she was never without her notebook, recording all the small and big moments of each day. Once, at an awards show, having listened with an expression of fixed absorption to an overlong and self-indulgent acceptance speech, she picked up her pen, scrawled and then flashed the word “WANKER” at me with an eye roll.
I will miss turning up at her house to be greeted by her in the doorway waving. God, she knew how to have FUN. When did the rest of us forget how? After a glass, or three, of fizz you would enjoy a relay race of wine at dinner into pudding, which most often proved to be a truly lethal fruit salad that would have been macerating in sloe gin for days. Anyone who ate at her table deemed it truth serum. It was potent in ways I can’t even describe and having dosed you, Jilly would hold court at the end of the table and, ever the journalist, ask you a series of probing questions. “Really,” she would breathe in response to the answers. “How extraordinary.”
If you were staying the night you would arrive, swaying, at your bed to a glass of water and an Alka-Seltzer, her standard curative for the evening’s many libations. The next morning, you would stagger downstairs to tea and toast, the air still swollen with last night’s disclosures. The heat of the Aga against your back as you clutched your head in your hands, wondering just how much you had spilled and what might end up in her next book. Jilly would arrive, eyes bright and blue, hair groomed: utterly gorgeous and revoltingly unaffected. Soon, she would turn back to the evening’s indiscretions, and you would both end up howling with laughter.
My husband ensured every letter she ever sent me was kept. A collection of animal postcards adorned with atrocious writing and wonderfully loving messages. “You’ll want to keep these,” he surmised. He was right. But I want her. That ravishing, glorious, breathtaking, heavenly, marvellous woman. Our Queen of Fucking Everything.
Her last voicemail to me was a perfect cocktail of Jilly innuendo, thanks and joy. I will forever be grateful for it.
“Felicity darling, it’s Jilly Cooper. I just wanted to say thank you so, so, so, so much. I was just about to start on my talk at Chatsworth and then suddenly that tribute by you and Dominic came up. I got so tall, pink and proud and I thought: ‘Gosh, I’m an author.’ Now, I’ve just come across a hysterical thing, your telephone number… the last number is soixante-neuf! Hahaha. Anyway darling, talk to you sometime. You are the special-ist agent in the world. Lots of love. Bye.”
Felicity Blunt is a literary agent at Curtis Brown, and represented Cooper for the last 10 years of her life. She serves as an executive producer on the Disney + adaptation of Rivals.
