Jilly Cooper was the undisputed queen of smut

Desire, sex expert Esther Perel tells us, lives in the gap between the unknown and the unknowable. It’s why married life – with its warts-and-all reckoning with someone you used to be insatiably curious about – tends to kill it. Unless, of course, you count desire for other people’s spouses as part of wedded bliss, and happen to live in Jilly Cooper’s Rutshire.

Following the news of Dame Jilly Cooper’s death at the age of 88 this week, the great and the good of UK publishing have rushed to tell us how fabulous the author and her books were. Gyles Brandreth, Elizabeth Day, even Queen Camilla (whose ex-husband Andrew Parker Bowles was apparently the inspiration for Cooper’s shagalific showjumper, Rupert Campbell-Black) have all come out in celebration of the failed PR officer who was apparently sacked 22 times (superb self-mythologising there, Jilly).

For a while in the late Nineties / early Noughties, Cooper’s books were deemed unbearably naff. This was less to do with the sex and more to do with her writing about the upper echelons of society at a time when class became the ultimate dirty word. Yet the fact that these upper-class sexploits in bucolic settings are so unrelatable is precisely what has preserved our desire for Cooper’s work.

There is no way you would get a Jilly Cooper commissioned now. Although fantasy is increasingly popular, publishing trends remain firmly entrenched in the hyper-real, with bookshop tables groaning with boredom under the weight of yet more ‘girls like us’ memoirs. Fairy porn and BDSM remain far more palatable to modern publishers than a land where selecting the wrong spoon for soup could seal your fate. Yet there’s something undeniably enticing about Cooper’s microcosm, where the height of human desire is mapped on to people with the kind of names you might have dreamed up at age 11 for your guinea pig’s cortège.

Unencumbered by rising council tax or the cost of petrol (they ride horses, natch), Cooper’s characters have time instead to agonise over which hedgerow might best shade a blowjob from your rival’s wife. In the land of posh-people problems, where ‘sinister black clouds advanced like a procession of Benedictine monks’, the greatest threat to your livelihood is chastity.

And when it comes to the actual sex scenes… well, they’re as fruity and frothy as anyone could wish for. As a writer of smut myself, I’ve often been told that the key to a good sex scene is matter-of-factness. But Cooper manages to send her characters up in a way that manoeuvres just on the right side of preposterous (‘leaning tower of pleasure’, anyone?). We smut-pedlars are often told by our editors, ‘Nobody says that’. But in Cooper’s world, you believe that her characters really would say that. That’s the beauty of being privy to her How the Other Half Fuck club.

Most books about sex don’t stand the test of time. I’d love to know how many people have long ago tossed out their copy of Fifty Shades of Bilge, but have reread Cooper’s Rivals since it was made into smash-hit TV for Disney+ last year, or will be rereading it now. That’s because when you think of Jilly Cooper, it’s not the sex that comes to mind, but the joy taken in it.

Yes, she may write a rake better than Barbara Taylor Bradford, but Cooper’s rakes are never without some semblance of self-reflection, and certainly not without charm. Her men may be drawn like dogs – ‘Elmer’s eyes were popping like a garrotted Pekinese’ – but never with contempt. Her depiction of the dance between men and women is sage, but never cynical. Which means, through Cooper’s world, we are reminded of the exhilaration of our desires, over and over again.

Nichi Hodgson is the author of The Curious History of Dating: From Jane Austen to Tinder and Bound to You. Follow her Substack here.