6 October 2025<\/time>\n <\/p>\nDame Jilly Cooper has died.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Dame Jilly Cooper has died<\/p>\n
\nThe Riders author passed away on Sunday (05.10.25) at the age 88 following a fall, her family have confirmed.<\/p>\n
\nHer children Felix and Emily said in a statement: \u201cMum, was the shining light in all of our lives.<\/p>\n
\n\u201cHer love for all of her family and friends knew no bounds.<\/p>\n
\n\u201cHer unexpected death has come as a complete shock.<\/p>\n
\n\u201cWe are so proud of everything she achieved in her life and can\u2019t begin to imagine life without her infectious smile and laughter all<\/p>\n
\naround us.\u201d<\/p>\n
\nJilly’s agent, Felicity Blunt, said she had lost a “friend, an ally, and mentor” and that it had been a “privilege” to work with the author, who has sold over 11 million copies of her books in the UK alone.<\/p>\n
\nShe wrote: \u201cThe privilege of my career has been working with a woman who has defined culture, writing and conversation since she was first published over fifty years ago.<\/p>\n
\n\u201cJilly will undoubtedly be best remembered for her chart-topping series The Rutshire Chronicles and its havoc-making and handsome show-jumping hero Rupert Campbell-Black.<\/p>\n
\n\u201cYou wouldn\u2019t expect books categorised as bonkbusters to have so emphatically stood the test of time but Jilly wrote with acuity and insight about all things \u2013 class, sex, marriage, rivalry, grief and fertility.<\/p>\n
\n\u201cHer plots were both intricate and gutsy, spiked with sharp observations and wicked humour.<\/p>\n
\n\u201cShe regularly mined her own life for inspiration and there was something Austenesque about her dissections of society, its many<\/p>\n
\nprejudices and norms. But if you tried to pay her this compliment, or any compliment, she would brush it aside.<\/p>\n
\n\u201cShe wrote, she said, simply \u2018to add to the sum of human happiness\u2019. In this regard as a writer she was and remains unbeatable.<\/p>\n
\n\u201cIn her last few years Jilly added to her curriculum vitae by serving as an executive producer on the Happy Prince adaptation of her novel Rivals for Disney+.<\/p>\n
\n\u201cHer suggestions for story and dialogue inevitably layered and enriched scripts and her presence on set was a joy for cast and crew alike.<\/p>\n
\n\u201cEmotionally intelligent, fantastically generous, sharply observant and utter fun Jilly Cooper will be deeply missed by all at Curtis Brown and on the set of Rivals.<\/p>\n
\n\u201cI have lost a friend, an ally, a confidante and a mentor. But I know she will live forever in the words she put on the page and on the<\/p>\n
\nscreen.\u201d<\/p>\n
\nJilly – who was born in February 1937 -began her career as a journalist and worked as a junior reporter for the Middlesex Independent from 1957 to 1959. She had a column for the Sunday Times from 1969 to 1982 and then worked for the Mail on Sunday for five years.<\/p>\n
\nHer first non-fiction book, How to Stay Married, was released in 1969 and she moved into fiction in 1975 with the publication of Emily.<\/p>\n
\nJilly married Leo Cooper in 1961 and they adopted their two children. They were married until the publisher passed away in November 2013 at the age of 79.<\/p>\n
\nThe Rivals author received her Damehood in the 2024 New Year Honours for services to literature and charity.<\/p>\n
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