The genius of Jilly Cooper, queen of British bonkbusters

Jilly Cooper novels are smutty, sexist and snobbish. They have titles such as “Mount!” and “Score!” and “The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous” and are not easily mistaken for the collected works of Jane Austen. Their cast lists feature characters such as Rupert Campbell-Black (“nirvana for most women”), Bethany (a “nymphomaniac”) and Cadbury (a Labrador). Her novels contain far too many appearances of the word “wet” and a frankly distressing number of “thrusts”. They are reprehensible in almost every way. They are, in other words, great fun. And they also say something about how Britain has changed during Ms Cooper’s long career.

The release of her latest novel, on November 9th, will be a peculiar publishing event. Everything from its nudging title (“Tackle!”) to its cover (more tackle—perhaps even tackle!—in white shorts) suggests that this is the sort of book that literary London will sneer at. In fact, literary London almost certainly will not. Ms Cooper has written 18 novels and sold over 11m copies in Britain alone. She has built up not so much customers as a congregation, less readers than religious believers. Her followers range from the prime minister, Rishi Sunak (“You need to have escapism”), to Cambridge dons (she is, one wrote, “precise, insightful, witty”).