Posted in: Disney+, Hulu, TV | Tagged: bonkbuster, Dame Jilly Cooper, disney, hulu, Rivals, romance

Rivals Author Dame Jilly Cooper, 85, Unexpectedly Passes Away

Dame Jilly Cooper, bestseller author of Rivals and mistress of the bonkbuster novel, has uexpectedly passed away after a fall at the age of 85

Bestselling author and queen of the Bonkbuster novel Dame Jilly Cooper has unexpectedly passed away after a fall on Sunday. She was 88 years old. "Her unexpected death has come as a complete shock," Her children Felix and Emily said. "We are so proud of everything she achieved in her life and can't begin to imagine life without her infectious smile and laughter all around us."

Jilly Cooper started out as a columnist for The Sunday Times in the late 1960s before starting her first romantic novels in the mid-1970s. She continued her columns, moving to The Mail on Sunday in 1982. Her first novel in the Rutshire series, Riders, was published in 1982 and helped launch the bonkbuster craze, with the most famous of the twelve books in the series, Rivals, released in 1985. Rivals remains one of her most popular books and is currently being adapted into a TV series on Disney+ and Hulu, with the second series now in production. Cooper made a cameo appearance in the first series. She was awarded the Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2004.

"Working with Jilly Cooper over the past thirty years has been one of the great privileges and joys of my publishing life. Beyond her genius as a novelist, she was always a personal heroine of mine for so many other reasons," said her publisher Bill Scott-Kerr. "For her kindness and friendship, for her humour and irrepressible enthusiasm, for her curiosity, for her courage, and for her profound love of animals.  Jilly may have worn her influence lightly but she was a true trailblazer. As a journalist she went where others feared to tread and as a novelist she did likewise. With a winning combination of glorious storytelling, wicked social commentary and deft, lacerating characterisation, she dissected the behaviour, bad mostly, of the English upper middle classes with the sharpest of scalpels."

"It is no exaggeration to say that Riders, her first Rutshire chronicle, changed the course of popular fiction forever," Scott-Kerr also noted. "Ribald, rollicking and the very definition of good fun, it, and the ten Rutshire novels which followed it, were to inspire a generation of women, writers and otherwise, to tell it how it was, whilst giving us a cast of characters who would define a generation and beyond."

"Over the course of  her writing life, she has been a friend and inspiration to generations of readers, editors, publicists, marketeers and salesmen and women," Scott-Kerr said. "She has been a foundation stone of Transworld's business, always invested in our success, with a sharp eye on how we did things and always there to celebrate every success. A publishing world without a new Jilly Cooper novel on the horizon is a drabber, less gorgeous place and we shall mourn the loss of a ground-breaking talent and a true friend."

Dame Jilly Cooper's funeral will be a private service; a public event will be held at Southwark Cathedral in South London in the coming months, with details to be announced. She has a new book, How to Survive Christmas, due to be published through Transworld in November, that is described as "an irreverent and witty guide to surviving the festive season."

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