Celebrated novelist Jilly Cooper has died aged 88 after a fall, her family has announced. The Rivals author was famed for her raunchy romance novels, selling more than 12 million books in her career.
Her children Felix and Emily said her death on Sunday morning has come as a 'complete shock'. They said in a statement: 'Mum was the shining light in all of our lives. Her love for all of her family and friends knew no bounds. Her unexpected death has come as a complete shock. 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.'
Dame Jilly Cooper's agent Felicity Blunt issued a similarly warm tribute, saying the author 'defined culture, writing and conversation' throughout her career.
The author was best known for her books in The Rutshire Chronicles, featuring the showjumping lothario Rupert Campbell-Black. Rivals, perhaps the most famous of the series, was recently adapted for television by Disney+.
The novelist lost her husband, Leo Cooper, to Parkinson's disease in 2013. The author had known him since she was nine years old and refused to send him into a care home even when his condition worsened. Dame Jilly confessed that she only continued to write novels in her later life to pay for her husband's medical bills.
Ms Blunt said: 'The 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. Jilly 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. You wouldn't expect books categorised as bonkbusters to have so emphatically stood the test of time but Jilly wrote with acuity and insight about all things - class, sexual intercourse, marriage, rivalry, grief and fertility. 'Her plots were both intricate and gutsy, spiked with sharp observations and wicked humour.'
She regularly mined her own life for inspiration and there was something Austenesque about her dissections of society, its many prejudices and norms. 'But if you tried to pay her this compliment, or any compliment, she would brush it aside. 'She wrote, she said, simply "to add to the sum of human happiness". In this regard as a writer she was and remains unbeatable.'
She added: 'Emotionally 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. I 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 screen.'