From The Archive: C&TH In Conversation With Jilly Cooper

Earlier this week, beloved author Jilly Cooper died aged 88. In 2023, C&TH Books Editor Belinda Bamber met the Rivals (1988) author to discuss her newest Rutshire Chronicles instalment, Tackle! (2023) – which would turn out to be everyone’s final jaunt into Jilly’s fictional slice of the British countryside. Belinda recalls the author as brimming with ‘warmth’ and their lunchtime meeting as a ‘classically jolly Jilly lunch at her home’, filled with Champagne and gossip.

When it was published in 2023, Tackle! was Jilly’s first Rutshire novel in the best part of a decade, following Mount! (2016). And in a divergence from much of Rutshire‘s sporting preoccupations, the action of Tackle! takes place on the pitch rather than in the stables as perennial protagonist Rupert Campbell-Black takes on a low-division football team.

Here is Belinda’s 2023 feature in full.

MORE: 5 Jilly Cooper Classics To Read In Memory Of The Beloved Author

Interview: Jilly Cooper On Tackle!

The beautiful 14th-century house where Jilly Cooper has lived for over 40 years is hidden at the end of a rural Cotswolds lane. She greets me wearing a cardigan that matches the robin’s-egg blue of her eyes, looking decades younger than 86 thanks to her English-rose complexion. The queen of the bonkbuster – as she was dubbed 50 years ago when her novels first electrified readers with their explicit (yet often hilarious) sex scenes – has long deserved the crown of national treasure.

Although millennials might not know her, she’s about to burst into their consciousness with her first new novel since 2016 – a football story called Tackle! – and the Disney Plus serialisation of her 1988 novel Rivals, starring Aidan Turner and David Tennant. ‘I’m not allowed to talk about it,’ she tells me, ‘but I’ve seen the first episode and it’s marvellous.’ Her grandson is a runner on the show, and she’s delighted to be known on set as ‘Jago’s granny’.

Though she demurs at calling herself a feminist, Jilly’s spirited heroines have been a model for equal pleasure in the bedroom. The two stable girls in Tackle! are celebrated rather than judged for their love of threesomes and, in a typical Jilly-esque line, Marketa is diverted by her lover’s body tattoos because: ‘I love reading in bed’. Her belief that sex should be fun reflects her conviction that we all need cheering up, especially during current conflicts. Her new novel contains scenes in Ukraine, to reflect her concern about the invasion: ‘Bloody Putin’. She often recounts how she and her husband Leo, who died in 2013, would laugh uproariously together, though ‘I’ve forgotten how to do sex really,’ she sighs, and there are fewer riotous bedroom scenes in Tackle!, partly to do with the benching of Rupert Campbell-Black, sex god of her Rutshire Chronicles, because he’s heroically tending to his sick wife, Taggie.

Jilly’s jokes are often a way of upending serious topics: in Tackle! there’s a cat called Mew Too and a ‘Glittoris’ designed to help hapless males find the clitoris. ‘Poor men are thinking, “where the hell is it”!’ she exclaims. The Tackle! cast don’t need any help, since players make successful passes both on and off the pitch – plus there’s a love story between two men. As ever, it’s a Shakespearean comedy in which characters blunder around dazed with unrequited longing until true love wins through. Jilly’s books are a perfect pick-me-up, because she creates a redemptive world in which goodies are kind, loyal and devoted to dogs, while baddies are bores and blackguards who mistreat their horses.

Football is a surprise new subject for Jilly, though she was already a fan of Manchester City and especially Jack Grealish, a ringer for one of her cheeky heroes. Jilly claims she still can’t understand the offside rule but dribbles puns through the pages like a pro, from ‘Macho of the Day’ to a WAG ‘bitch invasion’ and, of course, ‘multiple scoregasms’. As for the player called Midas, ‘everything he touched turned to goals’. ‘Puns irritate everybody dreadfully, but I just love doing them,’ she beams. The good-heartedness of her irreverent approach is perhaps how she manages to navigate the choppy seas of political correctness – ‘I’m 86 and I do say outrageous things,’ she admits, ‘but I just want the sexes to love and look after each other.’

There are serious themes, too, such as Dolphy, a character who had a miserable time in a children’s home – a subject dear to the author’s heart after her own ectopic pregnancy led her to adopt two children. The value she places on home life reflects her own upper-middle-class childhood with ‘divine’ parents, and Jilly proudly shows me a photo of her handsome, ‘very clever but very shy’ military father. She hated boarding school, where she was known as ‘the unholy terror’ and abandoned the chance of a longed-for place at Oxford after fleeing the second interview, ‘horrified by these tweed-suited women’.

‘If I’d gone to Oxford I’d probably have written some boring book on Walt Whitman,’ she muses. Instead, she landed a job as a reporter on a local Essex newspaper and starting writing for the Sunday Times in 1969 after regaling an editor at a dinner party with her hopeless-housewife anecdotes; she pioneered the witty confessional column, echoed since in the likes of Bridget Jones’s Diary. Her 1970s interviews with celebrities are a fund of funny stories: she tells me about getting so uproariously drunk with debonair film star David Niven that she failed to file her copy and is still indignant with Robert Redford for claiming she tried to flirt with him.

Her 1985 blockbuster novel Riders brought Jilly widespread fame and is now listed alongside Pride and Prejudice (1813) on the BBC’s list of 100 most influential novels. After writing 50 bestselling fiction and non-fiction books, earning several awards and a CBE, you’d think she’d be ready to retire her trusty typewriter, ‘Monica’, but she’s already researching a new novel, set in Sparta, ‘where infidelity was once legal’. Her desk will always be her sanctuary, though from the photos cramming every shelf – including Queen Camilla, a longstanding local chum – and the warmth at her kitchen table, the good life is about family, friends, dogs, jokes – and champagne.

True, Jilly is worried about memory loss, but was comforted by a recent visit from actor Penelope Keith. ‘Penny told me, “Darling, sit down and don’t worry, you’ve written great books with characters and characters and characters, you know all these people, you’re quite old, and your brain’s just full.”’

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