Before writing novels, Cooper was a columnist for The Sunday Times and The Mail on Sunday (Credit: Getty Images)
Riders to Tackle!: Why Britain loved Jilly Cooper's raunchy books
Clare Thorp
Jilly Cooper, who died yesterday, was beloved in the UK. Her irresistible sagas of sex and shenanigans among England's rural upper-middle class society – featuring dashing cads, ambitious women, and a supporting cast of horses, hounds and huge country houses – have been bestsellers since the 1980s. What made her books so enduringly appealing?
The return of the bonkbuster: how horny heroines are starting a new sexual revolution
I longed for novels about female desire - women empowered by sex and their expressions of lust. So I sat down and wrote my own
Daisy Buchanan Wed 31 Mar 2021 06.00 BST
T
he idea for my novel Insatiableemerged from a simple question: where were all the horny women? I knew that we were secretly legion.In fact, I suspected that I was surrounded by women, sitting on buses, standing in queues, staring out of the window and simultaneously entertaining all kinds of filthy daydreams. After all, millions of us had bought and read Fifty Shades of Grey. Even if half the sold copies were bought by people who wanted to mock it, that left millions of genuinely horny women unaccounted for – and buying the sequels.
Illustration: Monika Jurczyk Monsie
I was not transported in the way I had hoped; I did not find Christian sexy, I did not relish the BDSM and, most of all, I struggled to connect with the beautiful, blank lead character, Anastasia. She seemed similar to every other sort-of-horny woman I had seen on screen, a sexual object before she was a sexual subject, a person who had to be perfect and prove herself desirable before she was allowed to pursue desires of her own.
In the wake of the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomenon, we asked authors to tell us who does sex best in fiction
Friday 6 July 2012 22.55 BST
Diana Athill
Alan Hollinghurst does sex rather well, but most of the writers who do it best don't "do" it at all, but simply allow it to happen in a way that can easily be supplied by any reader who happens to have done it.
John Banville
I find The Story of O deeply erotic precisely because the woman at the centre of it holds all the power, even though she seems the one most cruelly treated. Also the book is beautifully and tenderly written, in its odd way. Someone with a decent prose style should do a proper translation of it.
Mary Beard
It's got to be Alan Hollinghurst, for me. I vividly remember sitting in my 10-year-old daughter's cello lesson, with a rather fierce music teacher, reading The Folding Star ... she scratched the bow, and I went a bit pink. It was not so much at the sex itself, but at the sheer incongruity of the reading matter. And at the frisson that I might get found out.
Jilly Cooper
I like my erotic literature to be beautifully written as well as funny and can't do better than Chaucer. How about this from Troilus and Criseyde: "Her slender arms, her soft and supple back, / Her tapered sides – all fleshy smooth and white – / He stroked, and asked for favours at her neck, / Her snowish throat, her breasts so round and light; / Thus in this heaven he took his delight, / And smothered her with kisses upon kisses / Till gradually he came to learn where bliss is."
Margaret Drabble
The most erotic book I ever read was an anonymous novel called L'Histoire d'O, which I think was by a woman called Pauline Réage. It was a sado-masochistic romp and I was given a copy in France in the 1960s when it was probably illegal in England. It surpassed Georgette Heyer, who seemed very exciting when I was at school. I was rather alarmed by how exciting it was and I remember giving my copy to an Arts Council officer somewhere in the north of England when I was on tour there; I didn't think it a good book to have around the house with small children. I also found DH Lawrence thrilling, in a healthier and more respectable kind of way. The Rainbow has some wonderfully powerful love scenes.
Geoff Dyer
My favourite scene is the seduction in dialogue in The Names by Don DeLillo – but then my favourite everything is in that book. Is the scene erotic? Yes, in a meta-sort of way, but mainly it's incredibly intoxicating. It begins with the narrator, James, and some friends at a club in Athens, watching a belly dancer named Janet Ruffing. After the performance she changes into a cardigan and comes to sit with the group. James proceeds to ease his way into her consciousness so that "a curious intimacy" is formed. After some polite exchanges he asks her to "say belly. I want to watch your lips." Then it's, "Say breasts. Say tongue." The conversation spirals on for pages, Janet insisting "I don't do this" while getting drawn deeper into the giddy linguistic spiral. "Say heat," says James. "Say wet between my legs. Say legs. Seriously, I want you to. Stockings. Whisper it. The word is meant to be whispered."
Howard Jacobson
Softcore porn is the literary equivalent of those feathery wimp-whips and talcum'd cufflinks you see in the windows of sex toy shops. If you're going to torture your lover, at least break the skin, I say. You would expect me, therefore, to chose the scene I find most erotic from the pages of De Sade or Bataille. But as far as writing goes, the best sex is the most implicit. So I nominate the scene in Persuasion in which Captain Wentworth wordlessly, and with none of their past grievous history resolved, assists a fatigued Anne Elliot into a carriage. There is no overt sexuality, no titillatory play with power and dependence - he helps her in and that's that. "Yes - he had done it. She was in the carriage and felt that he had placed her there, that his will and his hands had done it." Anne might tell herself that the kindness proceeds from what remains of "former sentiment", but Wentworth's hands have been on her body, and we never doubt that it's her body that receives the shock of the contact as much as her mind.
John Mullan
When it was published in 1968, John Updike's novel Couples was a succès de scandale because of its minutely attentive descriptions of sex. Much of this is adulterous sex, enjoyed by the pleasure-seeking 30 something couples of the New England town of Tarbox. Half a century later the descriptive precision is not shocking but absorbing. In the first of the novel's many adulterous couplings, Piet Hanema and Georgene Thorne make love on her sunporch. Updike typically gives us every beautifully rendered detail: the fall of morning light, the "musty cidery smell" of pine needles, the texture of the blanket they lie on. Updike makes you see everything his characters see. His novel is descriptively promiscuous: we move between different viewpoints, male and female, sharing their pleasures and perceptions. There is an extraordinary kind of tenderness in this physical detail that is an effect of style and patience. The tenderness heightens our appalled sense of how these people lie to each other and deceive themselves.
Edmund White
I think the sexiest passages are those about Luc in Alan Hollinghurst's The Folding Star. The 33-year-old Edward Manners leaves England for Belgium and a job as the tutor to the 17-year-old Luc. After mooning over the boy for months, astonishingly he falls into Edward's arms. As he sleeps after sex Edward studies his handsome face: "While he slept I kept watch over him - a smooth shoulder, the little pool of his clavicle, his neck, his extraordinary face, his hair muddled and pushed back." This is the romantic postlude. The sex act itself is much more strenuous: "I was up on the chair, fucking him like a squaddy doing push-ups, ten, twenty, fifty ... His chest, his face, were smeared with sweat but it was mine: the water poured off me like a boxer, my soaked hair fell forward and stung my eyes." This sex-writing is convincing because it mixes the sublime with the carnal, the grossly physical with the spiritual – and all of it experienced as a shock, the longed-for consummation that one can't believe is really happening.
Twitter fiction: 21 authors try their hand at 140-character novels
We challenged well-known writers – from Ian Rankin and Helen Fielding to Jeffrey Archer and Jilly Cooper – to come up with a story of up to 140 characters. This is their stab at Twitter fiction
Geoff Dyer
I know I said that if I lived to 100 I'd not regret what happened last night. But I woke up this morning and a century had passed. Sorry.
James Meek
He said he was leaving her. "But I love you," she said. "I know," he said. "Thanks. It's what gave me the strength to love somebody else."
Jackie Collins
She smiled, he smiled back, it was lust at first sight, but then she discovered he was married, too bad it couldn't go anywhere.
Ian Rankin
I opened the door to our flat and you were standing there, cleaver raised. Somehow you'd found out about the photos. My jaw hit the floor.
Blake Morrison
Blonde, GSOH, 28. Great! Ideal mate! Fix date. Tate. Nervous wait. She's late. Doh, just my fate. Wrong candidate. Blond – and I'm straight.
David Lodge
"Your money or your life!" "I'm sorry, my dear, but you know it would kill me to lose my money," said the partially deaf miser to his wife.
AM Homes
Sometimes we wonder why sorrow so heavy when happiness is like helium.
Sophie Hannah
I had land, money. For each rejected novel I built one house. Ben had to drown because he bought Plot 15. My 15th book? The victim drowned.
Andrew O'Hagan
Clyde stole a lychee and ate it in the shower. Then his brother took a bottle of pills believing character is just a luxury. God. The twins.
AL Kennedy
It's good that you're busy. Not great. Good, though. But the silence, that's hard. I don't know what it means: whether you're OK, if I'm OK.
Jeffrey Archer
"It's a miracle he survived," said the doctor. "It was God's will," said Mrs Schicklgruber. "What will you call him?" "Adolf," she replied.
Anne Enright
The internet ate my novel, but this is much more fun #careerchange #nolookingback oh but #worldsosilentnow Hey!
Patrick Neate
ur profile pic: happy – smiling & smoking. ur last post: "home!" ur hrt gave out @35. ur profile undeleted 6 months on. ur epitaph: "home!"
Hari Kunzru
I'm here w/ disk. Where ru? Mall too crowded to see. I don't feel safe. What do you mean you didn't send any text? Those aren't your guys?
SJ Watson
She thanks me for the drink, but says we're not suited. I'm a little "intense". So what? I followed her home. She hasn't seen anything yet.
Helen Fielding
OK. Should not have logged on to your email but suggest if going on marriedaffair.com don't use our children's names as password.
Simon Armitage
Blaise Pascal didn't tweet and neither did Mark Twain. When it came to writing something short & sweet neither Blaise nor Mark had the time.
Charlie Higson
Jack was sad in the orphanage til he befriended a talking rat who showed him a hoard of gold under the floor. Then the rat bit him & he died.
India Knight
Soften, my arse. I'm a geezer. I'm a rock-hard little bastard. Until I go mushy overnight for you, babe. #pears
Jilly Cooper
Tom sent his wife's valentine to his mistress and vice versa. Poor Tom's a-cold and double dumped.
Rachel Johnson
Rose went to Eve's house but she wasn't there. But Eve's father was. Alone. One thing led to another. He got 10 years.
Why Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina transcends the ages
Five writers give their personal takes on the appeal that makes Anna Karenina a literary masterpiece
Jilly Cooper Sunday 2 September 2012 00.05 BST
Francine Prose, author of Blue Angel and My New American Life
Anna Karenina is probably my favourite novel. More than any other book, it persuades me that there is such a thing as human nature, and that some part of that nature remains fundamentally unaffected by history and culture. I try to re-read it every few years. Each time, perhaps because I'm older and have experienced more, I find things I never noticed before. Not only is it a great source of pleasure, but I inevitably feel as if I'm getting a sort of pep talk from Tolstoy: Go deeper. Try harder. Aim higher. Pay closer attention to the world. It's orchestral, symphonic, full of distinctive melodies, parallels and variations that keep reappearing, some of which we notice, none of which we need to notice in order for them to operate on our subconscious. There are so many virtuosic set pieces (the skating party, the ball, the mushroom-picking expedition, and, my God, the race during which Vronsky breaks his horse's neck) but also small, powerful, resonant moments: I've always loved the scene in which Anna, having met the charming Vronksy, returns home to her husband and is struck by how unattractive his ears are. How could something like that not stand up to, and transcend, the so-called test of time?
'He became a national symbol of courage and stoicism'
Saturday 18 December 2010
I
n July 1982 the Blues and Royals Mounted Squadron rode out from Hyde Park barracks – and what a magnificent sight those shiny black horses were. As they were approaching Hyde Park Corner an IRA nail bomb was detonated; it killed four soldiers and seven horses and left others with appalling injuries. At 19, Sefton was the oldest of the horses and the worst injured: his jugular vein was severed and a six-inch nail went through his bridle. But after 28 pieces of shrapnel were removed from his body, he made a slow but complete recovery and, miraculously, was back on parade the following November.