The bonkbuster queen who always wanted to write 'happy books'

Dame Jilly Cooper, the author of 'bonkbusters' including Rivals, Riders and Polo, has died after a fall at the age of 88. Rosie Shead and Charlotte McLaughlin look at a life less ordinary

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AUTHOR Dame Jilly Cooper, dubbed "the queen of the bonkbuster", will be remembered for her racy reads and playful sense of humour after a career spanning decades.

Best known for her steamy fiction, Dame Jilly's favourite literary themes included scandal and adultery in upper-class society, and she sold more than 11 million books in the UK alone, according to her website.

The first novel in her Rutshire Chronicles, Riders, published in 1985, made the BBC list of 100 important English-language novels in the love, sex and romance selection alongside Jane Austen's Pride And Prejudice.

Reflecting upon her career after becoming a dame, the author said she always wanted to write "happy books", adding: "The only thing I wanted to do in life was to cheer people up and people can get quite depressed, so I do like to tell lots of jokes."

Born in Hornchurch, Essex, in 1937, Dame Jilly grew up in Yorkshire and attended the private Godolphin School in Salisbury. Her father was a brigadier and her family moved to London in the 1950s where she became a reporter on The Middlesex Independent when she was 20.

She said she moved to public relations and was sacked from 22 jobs before ending up in book publishing.

In 1968 she got a break when she met Godfrey Smith, the editor of The Sunday Times Magazine (then called The Sunday Times Colour Section), at a dinner party, who commissioned her to write a piece, which led to a regular column in which she wrote openly about sex, marriage and housework.