My first love was called Luke. He was an American polo player who liked to quote Robert Frost and existed in a book published in 1992. If you don’t believe me, you can’t have been a teenager in thrall to the storytelling of Jilly Cooper CBE in the Eighties and Nineties.
Her novels, including Riders, Rivals, and Polo, were the backdrop of my formative years: I wanted to fold myself into the pages and inhabit this fictional landscape where women were “ravishing”, everyone was accomplished, every orgasm ecstatic, bad people got their just deserts and love always won. I fell hard for Cooper. Some 25 years later, I’m still devoted and anticipating her latest novel, Tackle!, published this week, which explores the world of football. No doubt it will offer the wit and forensic, biting detail she is famous for.
Literary snobs have long dismissed Cooper’s novels as ‘chick lit’ and ‘bonkbusters’ written for silly, frilly, frivolous ladies. See also pompous suggestions that they’re just ‘guilty pleasures’ – nothing more than ironic peccadilloes. And yet Cooper, who is 86, has sold 11 million books in the UK alone (perhaps her most notable fan is Rishi Sunak). For five decades, she has produced gripping stories with exciting multi-layered plots and characters worth investing in.
Cooper is a master at serving relatability, long before it was an Instagram personality trait
She offers us new, glamorous worlds which, on the surface, are ridiculous and unreachable, featuring sun-soaked bucolic valleys with houses named Valhalla, “heavenly” polo players, and couples doing unexpected things with pastry brushes. However, to dismiss these tales as posh porno on a page is reductive. Sure, the smut is what hooked me (and thousands of other schoolgirls), but what made me a lifelong devotee to these novels is their humanity.
For all the ridiculous euphemisms about “otters diving into summer streams” and “leaning towers of pleasure”, Cooper is a master at serving relatability, long before it was an Instagram personality trait. She majors on joy, pleasure, tenderness, and romance. Her stories could well be wish-fulfilment fiction, a device often disparaged in scholarly circles but, honestly, what’s wrong with a happy ending? Cooper gives her readers what they want, which is a temporary divorce from reality. Her work is an antidote to ‘poor me’ trauma fiction (which I am also a compete sucker for but it is having a very long moment).
Felicity Blunt, Cooper’s agent at Curtis Brown, believes a “combination of sheer joie de vivre and clever subtle social commentary” is what makes her novels so enduringly popular.
“Her books are both escapist and insightful and always meticulously researched, allowing any reader to feel fully immersed and educated about their world, be it show-jumping, polo, the world of franchise television, music, art, or football,” she says. “But, with every book, we are gifted complex and charismatic characters whose sharp and witty dialogue is evidence of the intelligence of their creator. Her Rutshire Chronicles together form a metaverse as intricately plotted as any Marvel programming phase and with a hell of a lot more humour and nuance.”
Her Rutshire Chronicles together form a metaverse as intricately plotted as any Marvel programming phase and with a hell of a lot more humour and nuance
Plenty of Cooper’s novels feature sexism which would outrage young readers today and make their older counterparts, like me, balk when considered through a 2023 prism. To use words Cooper would doubtless scorn at as PC abominations (she has said she misses wolf whistling and that modern men are “always crying” and “growing beards”), many of her heroes and plots are 'problematic' and possibly 'triggering' for today’s audiences.
Her most famous and enduring protagonist, Rupert Campbell-Black (showjumper, Tory MP, and “handsomest man in the world”, according to the blurb on Tackle! in which he features) would have doubtless been at the heart of #metoo and promptly cancelled if he were a real person.
So, is it an affront to feminism to love Cooper’s writing? Blunt dismisses the idea.
“I think the books accurately reflect the time they were written in, but they also put female pleasure front and centre of any romantic entanglement,” she says. “What is not to love about that? Jilly wants you to have fun when reading her novels, her legions of largely female readers would be testament to the fact that she succeeds in delivering that experience.”
It’s true that Cooper has always championed women’s desire – no one has a better time in bed than her heroines. Her sex scenes are written graphically but with wit and, above all, joy. It is filthy, and yet you don’t feel at all sullied.
Yet, she also documents the less glamorous aspects of the female experience. Her women might be unwashed and on a deadline, worrying about competing in professional sport while menstruating, farting with rage, peeing in sinks, navigating the agony of unrequited love, failing to get pregnant and, even, attempting suicide.Critics might say she’s silly, sexist, and hardly Chaucer, but I say making women feel seen, hopeful, and happy takes a rare sort of genius.
