Britain mourns its bonkbuster queen

It became known as “The Great Bottom Controversy”. It was 2015, a book called “Riders” had just been reprinted—and it was suddenly noticed that its cover had been changed. Where once the cover had shown a man’s hand clasping a girl’s bottom, now his hand was, almost chastely, on her lower back. The change was small, the outcry was not. The removal of the “buttock-cupping hand” was called “prudish”, “totally unsexy” and “a scandal”.

The bottom mattered because the book’s author, Jilly Cooper, did. For 50 years until her death this week, aged 88, Dame Jilly offered Britain fine social distinctions, finer bottoms and the chance to use words like “buttocks” in an otherwise bleak world. And Britain loved her for it. Her “dirty little books”, as one critic called them, would go on to sell 11m copies in Britain, gain their own literary category (“bonkbusters”) and even earn literary approval: the London Review of Books called her “Dickensian”.

Others were warmer yet. Less read than revered, Dame Jilly was called a “cult”, the bonkbuster “queen” and, last year, became an actual dame. The woman who had begun as a national scandal never quite became a national treasure—any author whose work contains phrases like “his cock [was] rising like some grotesque Italian pepper-grinder” could not be cuddled quite so close. Nonetheless her death was felt as a national tragedy: Queen Camilla paid tribute to a “legend”.

Dame Jilly herself was more modest. When interviewed recently about her future she said that she would “like to write a good book”. Partly this was pure self-deprecation. She had been born in 1937 into upper-middle-class England, a world in which people pronounced “forehead” to rhyme with “horrid”, and she saw any sort of boasting as very horrid indeed. Even after selling all those books she described herself as “very stupid”, “slow” and her first drafts as “very boring”.

Her later drafts were not. She became known as a chronicler of sex and horses—with reason. Her cast lists featured such characters as “LOVE RAT” (a stallion); “RUPERT CAMPBELL-BLACK” (the “handsomest man in England”, and a different kind of stallion) and “BETHANY” (a “nymphomaniac”). Literary snobs sniffed. The literary world, she retorted, is “divided into two sets: people like me who long for a kind word in the Guardian and people in the Guardian who long for my sales.”

Not everyone was so sniffy. Generations of schoolgirls read her books less as novels than as manuals, learning what sort of men are attractive (cads with long legs); what sort of women are unattractive (feminists with hairy ones); how to spot a socialist (beard, bad breath); and that no woman is so unattractive that she can’t be improved by washing her hair and the liberal application of green foundation. It was, in many ways, an odd manual.

But then in those days there was no other. Dame Jilly had been born into a world of debutantes’ balls and Debrett’s etiquette guide. By the time she was in her 20s there had been a social revolution and a sexual one, but not a domestic one. Women had a toe in the workplace but still had to be the angel in the house, with often hellish consequences. Her big break came in 1969 when an editor asked her to write an article about married life. She wrote about dirty sinks and dusting under the bed. It was not a noted piece of erotica. It became a sensation.

Women, she realised, were less “having it all” than doing it all. As a new wife she felt “on trial: sexually, domestically…socially” and “aware that I was inadequate on every count”. In her books women are reduced to tears by ravishing men—but also by feeling fat, cooking supper and by piles of laundry. Like the best lovers, she made women feel seen. And, as with the best lovers, women responded, passionately.

Though “Jolly Jilly” didn’t dwell on the dull. She came from a class where one of the greatest sins was to bleat or be a “bore”. She described herself as “lucky, lucky, lucky”. When asked about her husband, who had an affair with another woman for six years, she simply said, “I had a lovely husband.” She couldn’t understand modern women who “never stop grumbling”. She wrote as she did because “life is quite short of joy…And sex is heaven.”

If her youth saw the beginning of one revolution, her death saw the end of another. In 2024 Disney adapted her novel “Rivals” for TV. A woke-weary world tuned in, found it was smutty, sexist and full of gratuitous sex—and was smitten. Life, everyone suddenly remembered, is quite short of joy. When asked how she hoped to be remembered she said: “I hope I cheer people up.” The day after she died, the Sun, a British newspaper, put her on the front page. Its headline read: “Romp in Peace, Jilly”. ■