‍GREAT COMPANY: Novelist Jilly Cooper at home in Gloucestershire with her husband Leo who died in 2013

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‍By HENRY FITZHERBERT remembers a visit to Jilly Cooper who died last month aged 88

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‍In the Spring of 1989 I spent Easter with an extremely dull and ultra conservative Spanish family in Seville trying to brush up my GCSE Spanish.

‍While they spent hours in church and paraded solemnly behind floats of the Madonna during Semana Santa, I stubbornly stayed put in their apartment reading Rivals by Jilly Cooper. It was my first ‘Jilly’ and I raced through it, gripped by her compulsive storytelling, brilliant characterisation and hilarious social commentary. 

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‍Of course there was the sex too — rather educational for a sheltered 16-year-old then being educated by monks in North Yorkshire, at Ampleforth College. So while my Spanish hosts were praying to Our Lady, I was in heavenly Rutshire, and loving every moment. 

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‍Cut to a few weeks later, and I had the task of assembling the next edition of my school mag. For the previous edition I’d pulled off an interview with old Amplefordian Rupert Everett, which was published in Harpers & Queen, so I sent a clipping of the Harpers piece to Jilly and politely requested an interview. She wrote back by return, praising my article on Rupert and inviting me to her home in Gloucestershire. I couldn’t believe it and excitedly informed my English teacher, describing Jilly as ‘the new Jane Austen.’ He told me to grow up. (As a side note, said monk was later arrested for ‘running a sex club for young boys’). 

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‍So it was that during the holidays, I found myself in Rutshire HQ,  a star struck schoolboy in tweed jacket and tie being shown around ‘The Chantry’, Jilly’s idyllic country home, some parts of which dated to the 13th century and once formed part of a monastery. “There are monks buried in the garden” Jilly told me brightly. 

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‍As we settled into her drawing him I soon realised it would be some time before I could start my interview. Jilly showered me with questions (“Is Rupert Everett really gay?”) and within minutes I found myself confiding things I had never told anyone.

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‍ It was intensely flattering to be the subject of such curiosity — no wonder Jilly had been such a star journalist on the Sunday Times.

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‍“Don’t you love gossip, I do?” she said.

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‍The previous evening on television the Merchant Ivory film Maurice had played, starring a then unknown Hugh Grant. Jilly was in raptures. “Isn’t he beautiful, don’t you think he’ll be a huge star.” 

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‍We talked about her writing process and she said she found writing an enormous struggle (“I am such a bad writer”) and quoted Dr Johnson: “What is written without effort is read without pleasure.” But she needed the money, she explained: “Until I get my financial side sorted out and I don’t have sleepless nights about the tax bill and the bank manager I’ll keep on writing long novels.” 

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‍For her mother’s sake, she hoped one day to write a ‘literary’ novel, she told me. “My mother longs to have a daughter like Margaret Drabble so I’d like to write just one good book before she dies.”

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‍I said that in my view her books should be on the GCSE English lit syllabus, while the sex education was essential for repressed schoolboys like me up and down the land. Jilly chuckled and explained that the sex was a reflection of the time she wrote Riders.

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‍“I started to write Riders in 1971 when everyone was bonking themselves stupid and you couldn’t go to a party without somebody saying ‘come to bed with me and Charles’. However, it was only published in 1985 because when I finished it I got drunk with a friend a lost it on a bus…so I had to gird my loins and write it all again. So in a way it was a schizophrenic book because its was conceived in the 70s yet published in the 80s….anyway, lots of screwing goes on in showjumping.”

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‍With the sex out of the way, it was time for lunch and we repaired to the kitchen where Jilly’s husband Leo had prepared a slap up spread and served us like the maitre d’, pouring some very fine wine. “The most important thing is to enjoy yourself” he instructed, as I got quite sozzled. 

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‍How could I not enjoy myself? I was receiving red carpet treatment from one of the kindest celebrities on the planet, who had absolutely nothing to gain from giving up her day to a schoolboy. 

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‍Five years later and I had just completed my degree in Modern History at Oxford and was wondering how on earth I could break into Fleet Street. On a whim, I wrote to Jilly assuming she’d be far too busy to help, if indeed she could remember me at all.

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‍“Dear Henry,” she replied. “Of course I remember you, I’m so pleased you survived Ampleforth. I have passed on your CV to the Evening Standard…”

‍And with that, I landed my first job — on the gossip column. 

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‍14 November 2025