Dame Jilly Cooper, the enchantress who turned the English countryside into a perpetual orgy of hounds, horses, and hanky-panky, has trotted off to that great hunt in the sky at the age of 88. Born Jilly Sallitt on a blustery February day in 1937, in Hornchurch, Essex—a place as flat and unpromising as a vicar's handshake—she hailed from sturdy Yorkshire stock, her great-great-grandfather having founded a newspaper that no doubt specialized in reporting the scandals his descendants would later invent. One suspects she emerged from the womb already plotting her first fox hunt, or at least a spirited defence of the upper classes against the vulgarity of merit.
Jilly's literary career began not with a bang but with a column in the Sunday Times, where, in 1969, she skewered the absurdities of domestic bliss with the precision of a well-aimed riding crop. "How to Stay Married," she titled one, as if matrimony were a steeplechase best navigated sideways. From there, she galloped into fiction, birthing the Rutshire Chronicles—a saga of randy aristocrats, vengeful wives, and equines with more charisma than half the House of Lords. Riders (1978) set the pace, a bonkbuster blueprint where sex was less sin than national sport, and class warfare resolved itself in the hayloft. Who else could make fox-hunting sound like the erotic apex of civilization, or reduce a Labour government to a punchline involving misplaced garters?
Married twice—first to the wallpaper magnate Wally Sieper, then to the Olympian Paul Kember—she collected stepchildren, Labradors, and libel suits with equal gusto. Her homes, from the Cotswolds to Wiltshire, were less residences than menageries, where the line between pet and paramour blurred under her benevolent eye. Knighted as a dame in 2024, she accepted the honour with a modesty that fooled no one; after all, she'd been coronating herself Queen of the Shires for decades.
In an age of grim realism, Jilly peddled joyous escapism, proving that satire needn't sting if it's wrapped in silk stockings. She leaves a world dimmer for her absence, but infinitely more diverting for her books—eternal proof that even in death, the hunt goes on.