The writer Jilly Cooper, who has died aged 88, was a Georgian at heart, with all the 18th century’s preference for country above city, reason above passion, and mutual pleasure above sexual sufferance. Many of her bonkbusters were based in her fictional counties of Rutshire and Larkshire, where upper and middling natives pursued land, sports, profitable businesses, and each other, with lust and gusto, as in the works of Henry Fielding.
The novels were robust, and full of comic observation – she had a caricaturist’s eye for telling contrasts of detail, a handsome sleek horse next to a shaggy-shanked pony. They sold and sold, around 11 million copies in the UK.
