Author Jilly Cooper died at the age of 88 a year ago in a sudden death that shocked her fans and family
The family and friends of author Dame Jilly Cooper have paid tribute to her a year on from her death revealing how she brought joy – and gin – to so many people around her. Jilly died at the age of 88 in October last year following a tragic fall at her home in Bisley, Gloucestershire.
In a rare onstage interview her daughter Emily Tarrant became emotional as she remembered the good times with her mum. Emily, 55, said: “I have so many memories. I mean, her laugh, which was just a kind of huge shriek of joy to begin with, and then this kind of dirty little chuckle at the end.
“The time when I used to walk in the kitchen to go and see her, and she was standing by the aga with her hands covered in chicken fat because she was fed with the dog’s fresh chicken every day.
“But I think the memory that really sticks to my mind is our late night sloe gin drinking sessions. And so when everyone else had gone to bed, we used to stay up insisting just one, just one drink, and invariably a lot more than that. We used to sit around the kitchen table and just put the world to rights, really, and just me and her and it was, just lovely.”
Speaking at Cheltenham Literature festival, Emily went on to say that these nights would often end in the early hours of the morning, but Jilly had a cure.
“She always had alka seltzer. Any guest that came to stay, there was a glass of water and Alka Seltzer by the side of the bed. And it was her complete comic.”
Jilly had two with her late husband, Leo Cooper, Emily and her brother Felix, who were both adopted from an early age. Emily added: “She was definitely not strict. She tried to be, there was a lot of ‘wait till your father gets home’. But she wasn’t very strict at all. She was loving.
“She was incredible. She used to tell me my brother Felix that she loved us every day. We were both adopted from a very young age, and she told us that we were chosen all the time, and how lucky they were that they chose us. It was just an amazing thing. We were enveloped in love and it was just heaven.”
Emily and her brother Felix featured in some of Jilly’s journalism when she wrote for the Sunday Times Magazine when they lived in Putney, London.
But the family would then move onto Bisley in Gloucestershire which was when Jilly wrote her famous Rutshire Chronicles series inspired by the new life including Riders and Rivals.
She lived there with husband Leo until his death in 2016 in a home filled with dogs, love and lashings of gin and champagne. Returning the the theme of alcohol at a tribute night to the author in Cheltenham Literature festival her agent Felicity Blunt remembered famous fruit salads drenched in sloe gin which would act as a truth serum for guests at her Bisley home. It was then talk around the kitchen table would turn to gossip which could inspire another novel for Jilly.
Felicity said of Jilly’s legacy: “Joy. She just bought joy, and her books bring so much joy. And she just really wanted everybody to have the best time.
“She managed to create a party around people, and I don’t mean like 100 people attending. She just made you feel like you’re at the centre of a party, even if it’s just the two of you. And that’s definitely true of her writing. It’s funny. It’s entertaining. It’s so smart. It’s unpretentious. Yeah, joyful and unpretentious.”
Of her own fond memories, she added: “We’ve all been dosed at her kitchen table, and it would be sloe gin, and it would be the fruit salad that she made for the end of a meal. Where by then you were already half cut because she’d started you off at like five to 12, and so by time you get to eight, and then she would bring out her classic dessert, and she had had this fruit macerating in slow gin, like 40% proof or something, for like three days.
“And so, you know, by then you’ve had like four bottles of oyster bay or whatever it is, before that, the three bottles of champagne and some sort of the classic picky bit thing, and then some shepherd’s pie for dinner. But you’re sort of rolling, and then that hits you, and it was like a truth serum.
“And she’d ask you any number of questions, and you would tell her everything, everything around your life. She would be looking at the table going ‘really?’.”
Daughter Emily explained: “If anyone said anything interesting she would say I must write it down and rush off. She was a workaholic.”
But most of the work was written by hand and an iPad bought to help her once by son Felix stayed in a fruit bowl for a year and her mobile phone was often switched off.
When they were first released, some of Jilly’s saucy novels were sometimes mocked in comparison to more intellectual books.
But agent Felicity added: “She said to me ‘sure, I would really love to have their reviews of literary writers but I think they’d prefer my sales’.
“She’s number one. I mean, she was number one for over a year for Riders. it’s extraordinary the volume of copies that she sold.”
Felicity went on to say there was never any tension working with Jilly, and she had kept the last voice note Jilly left her praising some work she had done for the writer shortly before her death.
Felicity added: “She was always so effusive and always so quick to recognise the work that you give her, and not everybody does that in our lives, right?
“I would push her sometimes. Like on books, I actually remember like, ‘I really want more sex. Can you get more sex in this latest text. And she was like ‘I haven’t had it for a really long time!’ These books that she wrote, romances in the Seventies, are still being read in 2026, and they will still be read, you know, for decades longer.
“And that is that doesn’t happen. That doesn’t happen. It is an extraordinary legacy, and she wore it so lightly and with such humility.”
Novelist Helen Fielding, who wrote the hit Bridget Jones books, told the audience her own work had taken inspiration from Dame Jilly.
“Slightly horrifyingly for today I chose my book for today, Between The Covers, which is a collection of Jilly’s first writing in The Sunday Times.
“I realised she didn’t just inspire me, I think I copied the whole of Bridget from her. I was at school in Yorkshire in my teens when I first started reading Jilly in The Sunday Times.
“It was the first time I had seen anyone writing honestly about women and what they were really like, women being drunk, women having sex, women friendships, marriage, being chaotic and imperfect.
“It was very similar to Bridget. She talked about trying out every single diet but in those days, she called it slimming.
“I absorbed all this in my teens, and then regurgitated it again in my 30s. It was extraordinary to read. I think she is really underestimated as a writer.
“Even the Rupert Campbell-Blacks, who you could dismiss as a bounder, I am sure I copied Daniel Cleaver from him.”
Dame Jilly sold more than 11 million books in the UK alone, with readers mourning around the world when she died.
Queen Camilla led the tributes at the time, describing Dame Jilly as a legend and a “wonderfully witty and compassionate friend”, adding: “May her hereafter be filled with impossibly handsome men and devoted dogs.”
Her first book How To Stay Married was published in 1969 but she is perhaps best known for Riders in 1985 which began The Rutshire Chronicles filled with sex and scandal. Follow up Rivals was published in 1988 and is now a hit Disney+ series.
The Rutshire Chronicles ran to 11 novels in total. She returned to the series for a final time in 2023 with the book Tackle.
* Rivals Rivals Season 2, Part 2 will premiere on Wednesday, November 11 on Disney+.
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