Dame Jilly Cooper, who died in October 2025 at the age of eighty-eight, spent the better part of six decades making English readers laugh at themselves. She began in journalism, producing columns and non-fiction on class, marriage and animals, published How to Stay Married in 1969, and turned to fiction with the romance Emily in 1975.
Then came Riders in 1985, and with it the Rutshire Chronicles, eleven volumes of show jumping, television franchises, polo and adultery presided over by the magnificently unrepentant Rupert Campbell-Black. Riders alone sold more than a million copies. Private Eye christened her Super Cooper as a jibe; she adopted it as a book title, which tells you everything about her temperament.
Critics divided over her in her lifetime and have grown steadily kinder since, with academics comparing her handling of a huge cast to Trollope. The last Rutshire novel, Tackle!, appeared in 2023, Disney+ adapted Rivals in 2024, and in 2025 a prize for comic fiction was founded in her name.
2 hours and 43 minutes
