British author Jilly Cooper, beloved for her work on the Rutshire Chronicles, has died at the age of 88.
Her agent confirmed the news to The Hollywood Reporter on Monday morning, explaining that Cooper died Sunday after a fall.
Her children Felix and Emily 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.”
Cooper’s longtime agent, Felicity Blunt, added: “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, sex, marriage, rivalry, grief and fertility.”
“Her plots were both intricate and gutsy,” continued Blunt, “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.”
In her last few years, Cooper added to her resume as an executive producer on the Happy Prince adaptation of her novel Rivals for Disney+, starring David Tennant, Alex Hassell, Bella Maclean, Emily Atack, Danny Dyer, Katherine Parkinson and Nafessa Williams. The series follows Cooper’s novel on the infamous scoundrel and old money MP Rupert Campbell-Black and his rivalry with Tony Baddingham that seeps into the 1980s-set world of Rutshire, a fictional county in the Cotswolds, England.
But amidst the upper class debauchery and raunchy storytelling that made Cooper a household name in her native U.K. emerged a love story emblematic of the writer’s knack for romance.
“Her suggestions for story and dialogue inevitably layered and enriched scripts and her presence on set was a joy for cast and crew alike,” said Blunt. “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.”
A public service of thanksgiving will be held in the coming months in Southwark Cathedral in London.
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