Playful dame whose aim was simply to make readers 'happy'

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.

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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.

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.”

Working 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. Her first book, How To Stay Married, was soon published and in the 1970s she began turning her magazine stories into the romance novels Emily, Bella, Imogen, Prudence, Harriet and Octavia, along with a collection of short stories called Lisa & Co.

In March 1972, the author rated famous men such as British actor David Niven and former Labour chancellor Roy Jenkins by how she thought they would be in bed in the first UK edition of Cosmopolitan.