“The ‘Queen of the Bonkbusters’ is dead,” said Rowan Pelling in The Independent . And millions are mourning a woman who was not just the author of a string of bestselling books, but also “a symbol of something profoundly British and endlessly comforting”.

From her home in rural Gloucestershire, Jilly Cooper conjured a captivating world of rolling hills, faithful hounds, Agas, “cocktail hours, rogues called Rupert, sweet girls called Taggy, al fresco orgasms and laughing in bed”. The writer Caitlin Moran – who fell for Cooper’s novels while growing up on a council estate in Wolverhampton – once described it as “Sex Narnia”. The dogs, horses and other animals in Cooper Land don’t talk, of course, but they are as carefully drawn as her human characters, “and their deaths often more tearjer

See Full Page