Over 40 and loving it: let's celebrate fiction with positive older characters

June 28, 2019, 8:21 am

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≪ Previous: A new start: Jilly Cooper on the night in a Kama Sutra room that led to her book Riders

Too many books feature sterotypical older women who can’t use phones and don’t like sex. Gransnet and imprint HQ are looking for writers to change all that

There is a passage from Jilly Cooper’s Rivals which, despite first reading it in my early teens, has stayed with me, popping into my head with increasing frequency now I’ve stepped over the threshold into the over-40 bracket. Lizzie Vereker, the curvy, middle-aged wife whose rat of a husband is cheating on her, is contemplating her misery and “feeling rather old and dried-up”.

So she rubs “skin-food into her face, only to realise she’d forgotten her neck, which is supposed to betray your age most, so she rubbed the excess skin-food down into it. Then she remembered you were supposed never to rub skin-food downwards as it made your face droop. Would her life have been different, she wondered, if she’d always remembered to rub skin-food upwards? Would James have stayed faithful to her?”

Women over 50 are the fastest-growing group of workers in the UK

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Bonkbusters are about so much more than sex and shopping

June 30, 2019, 12:59 am

≫ Next: Jilly Cooper tops inaugural Comedy women in print awards

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Judith Krantz, who has died at 91, was a queen of the genre, putting confident women and their friendships to the fore

It was hard not to see the death of Judith Krantz at the age of 91 last week as the end of an era. Krantz was the “queen of the bonkbuster”, those glitzy novels with their gaudy covers and snappy often one-word titles – Scruples, Lace, Rivals– that dominated commercial fiction in the late 1970s and 1980s, spinning stories of fabulous lives lived at full tilt and stuffed full of sex, secrets and shopping.

As a teenager, I thrilled to those books: to Krantz’s Scruples, in which her formidable heroine, Billy Ikehorn (nee Winthrop), essentially anticipated the hipster shopping experience by about two decades, opening the shop that gave the book its title, a perfect pleasuredome with an on-site bar in which women tried on shoes and sipped champagne while their husbands drank beer and played backgammon; to Shirley Conran’s Lace, every 80s schoolgirl’s most feverish fantasy (just ask them about the notorious goldfish scene), in which four women meet at an elite Swiss finishing school before going on to conquer the worlds of fashion, publishing, journalism and (more randomly) charity fundraising; and to Jilly Cooper’s Rivals, which gave the genre a very British spin by having her heroes compete for an ITV franchise while fitting in the odd game of naked tennis.

Underneath the froth, these were books written by women who understood the ways in which women’s lives were changing

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Jilly Cooper tops inaugural Comedy women in print awards

July 10, 2019, 12:30 pm

≫ Next: The Guardian view on a book glut: to the victor go the spoils? | Editorial

≪ Previous: Bonkbusters are about so much more than sex and shopping

The Rutshire Chronicles author received the lifetime achievement honour, with prizes for rising stars Laura Steven and Kirsty Eyre

Reigning queen of the pun Jilly Cooper has been awarded the inaugural Comedy women in print (CWIP) lifetime achievement award “in recognition of her legacy and inspiration to comic women writers everywhere”.

The bestselling author, who at one point describes her hero Rupert Campbell-Black’s aggressive love-making as “like a power drill … her Campbell-Black-and-Decker”, was named winner on Wednesday night.

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The Guardian view on a book glut: to the victor go the spoils? | Editorial

August 23, 2020, 10:25 am

≫ Next: Between the Covers by Jilly Cooper review – as fresh as ever

≪ Previous: Jilly Cooper tops inaugural Comedy women in print awards

Many publishers are enjoying record sales – but not all. We must take care that those with the biggest names and deepest pockets are not the only beneficiaries

As the weather turns and the days shorten, as trees bend low with fruit and blackberries darken the hedges, bookshops are bracing for a bumper crop of their own. September and October are always rich, but this year is exceptional: nearly 600 books will reportedly be published in the UK on 3 September alone.

About 55% of these books are academic and professional, and will not enter a bookshop at all. But 20% more trade books will be published than on the same date last year – a rise replicated on nearly every weekend of the autumn, while Super Thursday the following month is predicted to see a 50% increase.

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Between the Covers by Jilly Cooper review – as fresh as ever

October 27, 2020, 12:00 am

≫ Next: Jessie Greengrass: 'Frog and Toad Are Friends contains one of the best jokes ever written'

≪ Previous: The Guardian view on a book glut: to the victor go the spoils? | Editorial

This collection of Cooper’s newspaper columns from the 60s and 70s is bitchy, saucy, insightful and, most of all, great fun

Good journalism is easier to read than to write, especially the kind that has to do with (ugh) so-called lifestyle. It’s all about tone, and more hacks than you might imagine, not to mention their editors, have a tin ear in this regard. This kind of journalism tends, moreover, to go off faster than fresh fish.

All of which makes Between the Covers, a new collection of Jilly Cooper’s journalism, the more remarkable. Yes, there are columns here that will seem painfully dated to 21st-century eyes; women are no longer, thank God, expected to drop their girlfriends when they marry, and thereafter only to socialise as a couple. Some references, too, may be beyond younger readers: you have to be of a certain age (my age, probably) to know what she means when she describes sex as “only the liquid centre of the great New Berry Fruit of friendship”. But in the main, perky, clever and rather wise, these pieces still slip down as easily as a nice cold glass of something crisp and white. A certain kind of self-deprecation – we call it humblebragging now – can be extremely grating over 100 pages, or even, to be honest, over a paragraph. But not only is Cooper’s modesty completely genuine; she’s just as apt to deploy a little quiet pride here and there. She will never patronise her readers by posing as something she is not.

Spilling her guts, you feel, is about as appealing to her as the thought of housework

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Jessie Greengrass: 'Frog and Toad Are Friends contains one of the best jokes ever written'

March 19, 2021, 3:00 am

≫ Next: The return of the bonkbuster: how horny heroines are starting a new sexual revolution

≪ Previous: Between the Covers by Jilly Cooper review – as fresh as ever

The author on underrated ‘great of feminist literature’ Gaudy Night, looking forward to every Ian Rankin novel, and never finishing Middlemarch

The book I am currently reading
Danielle Evans’s The Office of Historical Corrections, which I’m reading for the second time, because it has haunted me since I read it for the first time a few months ago. The stories in this collection range widely, but the thread of race runs through them. She articulates with great precision the inescapability of racism for those who are subject to it, and, having read it, I feel as though she has patiently explained something that I should have known already. That I hadn’t thought to know it before has left me ashamed.

The book that changed my life
There are honestly so many. I think my whole mind, broadly speaking, boils down to an accumulation of text – it’s how I’ve always come at the world. I can remember as a teenager reading Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus, and feeling like the world had opened up – reading Doris Lessing’s Shikasta and feeling extremely clever. I lay in the sun and read Agatha Christie novels and it was a kind of peace, because it let me out of my life for the duration. I read The Waste Land and ached a lot about it and, at university, Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, of all things, broke my heart. John Donne’s sermons showed me what language can do when it is allied with thought. Kyril Bonfiglioli’s Mortdecai trilogy made me laugh absolutely without restraint at a time when laughter otherwise was hard to come by, and when, in my 20s, I was too ill to do much else, I read Jilly Cooper’s Rutshirenovels and John Berryman’s The Dream Songs alternately because they felt like counterweights, which might with luck allow me to cling on to the rope. Books have always been everything – respite, joy, escape, explanation, puzzle. The whole lot of them have both changed my life, and made it.

The High House by Jessie Greengrass is published by Swift (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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The return of the bonkbuster: how horny heroines are starting a new sexual revolution

March 30, 2021, 10:00 pm

≫ Next: Save the world, then ice a cake: how women have to juggle life, work and art

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I longed for novels about female desire - women empowered by sex and their expressions of lust. So I sat down and wrote my own

The 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.

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.

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Save the world, then ice a cake: how women have to juggle life, work and art

March 5, 2016, 4:05 pm

≫ Next: Fifty shades of shame (or why you won’t find the books I read on my shelves) | Flic Everett

≪ Previous: The return of the bonkbuster: how horny heroines are starting a new sexual revolution

Exhibition of celebrity female to-do lists, from Jilly Cooper to Cherie Booth, offers insight into busy 21st-century lives

Few “to-do” lists include “call Jason Donovan, buy secret Santa gifts and then write to Melinda Gates” but these were all in a day’s work for Emma Freud. The writer and campaigner is among female celebrities and performers who have revealed their lists for a London exhibition dedicated to the cult of the “to-do” list, which opens on International Women’s Day on 8 March.

The show, called The Pram in the Hall, created by artist Alice Instone, reveals that Emilia Fox needed to tidy her bedroom and then learn her lines for Silent Witness, while Sadie Frost had to brainstorm a new line of bikinis while preparing tea for her children. Human rights activist Shami Chakrabarti had to buy a Christmas tree and then re-read the counter-terrorism bill.

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Fifty shades of shame (or why you won’t find the books I read on my shelves) | Flic Everett

March 25, 2016, 4:57 am

≫ Next: London – the view from outside

≪ Previous: Save the world, then ice a cake: how women have to juggle life, work and art

The worthy titles people display at home are often unread, while private passions – from Dan Brown to Christian Grey – are shuffled swiftly off to Oxfam

“I could never get rid of a book,” plenty of people say, when what they really mean is: “I could never get rid of a book that makes me look clever.” Middle-class bookshelves are as carefully curated as any art exhibition, crafted to reflect us in the best possible light; a hint of the intellectual (Julian Barnes’s The Noise of Time, Foucault’s Pendulum), a bit of modern award-winning literature (A Brief History of Seven Killings, The Song of Achilles) and a few stylish, lighter pieces to show we know the difference between a classic and a casual beach read (Where’d You Go, Bernadette, How to Build a Girl). All so that when visitors cast an eye over the shelves, we can say: “Have you read it? I really enjoyed it, actually,” without embarrassment, indicating the golden door-stop of Bring Up the Bodies, or the slim elegance of the adoringly reviewed We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

And yet it’s all built on lies. Very few of us want to keep the books we actually enjoyed as we commuted to work, or lay on a Spanish beach. Like cheap one-night stands, they’re passionately embraced and dumped before the airport taxi arrives. That’s why this week, a Swansea charity shop begged its patrons to stop donating used copies of Fifty Shades of Grey.

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London – the view from outside

April 24, 2016, 2:30 am

≫ Next: Battle for the bulge: Jilly Cooper's Mount! is no return to saucy covers

≪ Previous: Fifty shades of shame (or why you won’t find the books I read on my shelves) | Flic Everett

How does London appear to those who do not live there? Culturally vibrant, exciting and diverse? Overpriced, polluted and self-important? On the eve of the mayoral elections, we ask cultural figures who now live elsewhere to speak some home truths to the capital…

Poet and writer, Lincolnshire

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Battle for the bulge: Jilly Cooper's Mount! is no return to saucy covers

June 8, 2016, 5:13 am

≫ Next: Jilly Cooper: ‘People were always coming up to us at parties and asking us to bed’

≪ Previous: London – the view from outside

Her publisher controversially cleaned up last year’s reissue of Riders. Will readers keep their cool over the 50-Shadesian packaging of her new book?

The talk on the books desk this morning has strayed away from the imminent revelation of the winner of the Baileys prize to Rupert Campbell-Black’s jodhpurs, following the revelation of the cover for Jilly Cooper’s forthcoming new novel, Mount! (The exclamation mark is the author’s.)

After the Great Bottom Controversy of 2015, which saw fans react with outrage to Cooper’s publisher’s decision to shift a buttock-cupping hand slightly away from the danger zone for a new edition of Riders, the jacket of Mount! was always going to attract an incisive and in-depth analysis – Cooper is, after all, the reigning queen of the bonkbuster, author of sexed-up doorstoppers including Polo, Rivals and Riders.

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Jilly Cooper: ‘People were always coming up to us at parties and asking us to bed’

September 10, 2016, 4:01 am

≫ Next: Mount! by Jilly Cooper review – daft, boozy joy

≪ Previous: Battle for the bulge: Jilly Cooper's Mount! is no return to saucy covers

The doyenne of the bonkbuster talks about her latest doorstopper, her marriage and the days before political correctness

“I think,” says Jilly Cooper, managing to seem both nervous and delighted, “that people are going to be very cross.” The doyenne, as one writer put it, of “sweaty horseflesh, adulterous bonking and beautiful people with posh voices” is talking about a significant development that occurs towards the end of her latest brick of a novel, the breathlessly named Mount!, published this month by Bantam.

For the first time since 1988’s Rivals, her blond-haired, blue-eyed toff Rupert Campbell-Black has a starring role in the story, rather than a bit part, and Cooper has created some rather unexpected plotlines for the man she variously describes as “Mecca for most women” and “as bloody-minded as he is beautiful”. It’s not quite Game of Thrones, but “it was very shocking”, she says, of this particular twist, almost as if it swooped in to the novel of its own accord.

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Mount! by Jilly Cooper review – daft, boozy joy

September 15, 2016, 4:00 am

≫ Next: Jilly Cooper: ‘My books are my babies’

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A whirlwind of parties, hairdos and horses hails the return of one of fiction’s most lusted-after characters

There is a single word, about three quarters of the way through this book, spoken at the heights of ecstasy by a 59-year-old man to a 30-year-old woman, that is so appalling, so extraordinary and so unutterably Jilly Cooper you can’t imagine anyone on the receiving end of it not immediately dissolving in horrified laughter, kicking the offender out of bed, and calling the OED.

Unless, of course, the man in question was Rupert Campbell-Black.

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Jilly Cooper: ‘My books are my babies’

April 7, 2017, 4:59 am

≫ Next: Can you match the house to the writer it inspired? – quiz

≪ Previous: Mount! by Jilly Cooper review – daft, boozy joy

The novelist talks about her pride in her father, her mother – who taught her to read at four – and how writing novels saved her from loneliness after the death of her husband

My father, Bill, was very, very shy, but he was divine. And very clever: he got a first in two years at Cambridge University and then became the youngest brigadier in the army, which made me burst with pride. He and I used to play Beethoven piano duets.

After the war, he ran English Electric and then became managing director of an engineering firm in Bradford. One day, the board of directors asked him to tell the chairman he was too old and ought to step down. When he plucked up the courage to do so, the old man flipped his lid, called in the other directors and said, “Bill’s tried to throw me out.” Not one of them spoke up for Daddy. He was fired by lunchtime, which meant we lost our beautiful house. So shocking! So perfidious!

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Can you match the house to the writer it inspired? – quiz

August 9, 2017, 10:15 pm

≫ Next: Jilly Cooper: modern men have beards and cry all the time

≪ Previous: Jilly Cooper: ‘My books are my babies’

The residence that helped Stephen King conceive a horror classic has gone on sale in the US. We have some other properties for you to view …

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Jilly Cooper: modern men have beards and cry all the time

May 31, 2018, 11:46 am

≫ Next: Katharine Whitehorn: This is how you changed our view of the world

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Author tells Hay festival of phenomenon of ‘married men wanting to have gay affairs’

Jilly Cooper, the doyenne of the posh bonkbuster, has given her observations on modern men: they cry too much, always have a beard and are perhaps so scared of women they seek relationships with men.

In a lively talk at the Hay literary festival on Thursday, Cooper, mostly with her tongue in her cheek, spoke about sex, horses, football, gender fluidity and Germaine Greer, who had appeared at Hay the previous day.

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Katharine Whitehorn: This is how you changed our view of the world

June 2, 2018, 4:05 pm

≫ Next: Germaine, your shock-jock musings just alienate today’s young feminists | Barbara Ellen

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It was revealed last week that the veteran Observer journalist, Katharine Whitehorn, now aged 90, has advanced Alzheimer’s. Four women – three writers and a reader – tell how her radical brand of journalism was a catalyst for a new way of thinking

Former Observer journalist and friend: ‘We became mates over long lunches’

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Germaine, your shock-jock musings just alienate today’s young feminists | Barbara Ellen

June 3, 2018, 1:30 am

≫ Next: If having a dog means you can never have another holiday, is it worth it?

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With her views on rape, Germaine Greer has torpedoed the chance for women of all generations to find common cause

How can older women, even fiendishly brainy, internationally celebrated feminist academics, expect respect from, in particular, younger women, if they spout embarrassing, offensive, outdated claptrap?

Many will have heard by now of Germaine Greer’s remarks about rape at the Hay literary festival, turning what could have been a worthwhile discussion – about the legal complexities of consent, and strategies for more successful conviction – into an inglorious display of shock-jock showboating.

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If having a dog means you can never have another holiday, is it worth it?

June 13, 2018, 8:58 am

≫ Next: A new start: Jilly Cooper on the night in a Kama Sutra room that led to her book Riders

≪ Previous: Germaine, your shock-jock musings just alienate today’s young feminists | Barbara Ellen

Jilly Cooper hasn’t been away for 22 years because she can’t bear to leave her greyhound – but every day is like a holiday when there’s a dog in your life

Jilly Cooper says she hasn’t had a holiday in 22 years because she would miss her dog too much. “It’s ridiculous, but I can’t bear to leave Bluebell,” she said, adding that it helps that she lives somewhere lovely. “Gloucestershire is so beautiful in the summer, I don’t want to go away.”

I live in the bucolic surroundings of a big city, soothed by the dulcet natural tones of car horns and sirens, so I quite like going away whenever possible, but having a dog does make it more difficult, for practical as well as sentimental reasons. The main way of dealing with the missing-them part is to take them with you. This is less easy for Cooper, who has a greyhound, too gangly to be truly portable, but manageable for me, with a little whippet, and a fondness for the kind of walking-based breaks beloved of retirees and BBC Four presenters.

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A new start: Jilly Cooper on the night in a Kama Sutra room that led to her book Riders

January 1, 2019, 3:00 am

≫ Next: Over 40 and loving it: let's celebrate fiction with positive older characters

≪ Previous: If having a dog means you can never have another holiday, is it worth it?

While struggling to write the novel that would transform her career, she discovered the country pile that would prove inspirational

Being a very horsey little girl, I always dreamed about writing a novel about show jumping, but I didn’t get down to it until I was in my 30s, in 1972, when my publisher gave me an advance and my husband, Leo, and I moved to Putney in London. Ten years later, shamefully, I had made little progress, finding it difficult to describe the changing seasons in London and having only riding school horses to interview.

Then, in May 1982, Leo, I and our two mongrels, Mabel and Barbara, were invited to Longleat for the weekend. Our host, Alexander Thynn, the Marquess of Bath, was an adventurous artist and we were excited to find ourselves sleeping in the Kama Sutra room. This had a rhino horn sticking out of the bedhead of a large four-poster, a mirror on the ceiling and numerous couples in different sexual positions painted around the walls.

This story of change was published in the G2 special issue A new start on 31 December

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