Jilly Cooper

Novelist who brought joy to millions with tales of sex, mischief and muddy boots among England's racy rural set

- Patrick Kidd

Autumn in Rutshire is the season of moist and mellow fruitiness - jilly weather, they call it - but an air of melancholy lay over the county.

The trousers hung at half-mast at Penscombe Court, the bosoms paused in mid-heave, on hearing the sad news. Dame Jolly Sooper, as they called Rutshire's finest ambassador, had cleared life's final fence.

For 40 years, Jilly Cooper chronicled the comings and goings - largely the comings - of the rampant Rutshire gentry. It is a land of rotters such as Rupert Campbell-Black, Olympic showjumping champion, Tory minister and handsomest man in all England, and those who lust after them. She wrote with equal enthusiasm about the formidable sort of women who know how to wring a pheasant's neck. "The male is a domestic animal," she wrote, "which, if treated with firmness, can be trained to do most things."

Her books were seldom underwritten. Riders weighs in at 919 pages, Rivals relatively short at 716. But they were shared avidly, even if you needed both hands to hold them, spoiling the pleasure for some. Cooper wrote about sex with a smile. Her mission, she told her agent, Felicity Blunt, was "simply to add to the sum of human happiness". Fans included the Queen, on whose first husband Campbell-Black was based, and, more surprisingly, Rishi Sunak, who praised its "escapism".