Jilly Cooper, 87, has written raunchy novels for decades. Adapting her 1988 book Rivals for the streaming age meant tweaking some details. Walking into Jilly Cooper’s house in the English countryside is like stepping inside one of her novels.
The living room walls are covered in pictures or bookshelves, and the surfaces by ceramic cats, dogs and horses. Pictures of loved ones (family) and notables (royal family) are scattered throughout the room. The windows look over a landscape of rolling hills.
It was from this 14th-century home, and on a manual typewriter, that Cooper, 87, wrote the Rutshire Chronicles , an 11-book series of romance novels featuring the handsome and troubled horse-riding hero Rupert Campbell-Black. The novels sold 12 million copies in Britain, where they shaped a generation of readers’ ideas about romance, sex and the upper classes in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Known as “the queen of the bonkbuster” – an amalgam of “blockbuster” and “bonking,” a very English way of referring to you-know-what – Cooper’s name is synonymous in Britain with juicy romance and well-heeled naughtiness.
In the United States, it has less resonance..
