Celebrating 50 years of Yours
Best-selling author Jilly Cooper (86), reveals how a horse riding accident that left her arm paralysed for two years was the inspiration for her first book Riders…
Jilly Cooper’s career as a novelist started to take off in the early Seventies, just about the time that Yours first launched. She had always wanted to be a writer of fiction, she says now.
“I’d write short stories at school and leave them in other girls’ desks or under their pillows. I was always happily or unhappily in love and that’s what I liked writing about.”
She then got a job on a teenage magazine called Intro. “I had to edit other people’s short stories but I was hopeless. The Editor called me in one day to tell me as much and then suggested I write some stories of my own. She published the first one and others that followed.”
They later blossomed into a series of romantic novels, each with a girl’s name as its title: Emily (published in 1975), Bella, Imogen, Prudence, Harriet and Octavia. By then, Jilly was married to Leo Cooper, a publisher of military histories, who had introduced her to publisher and literary agent, Desmond Elliott.
In 1985, she published Riders, the first of the Rutshire Chronicles “in which rich, glamorous people behave badly”, principal among them, Rupert Campbell-Black, a handsome and celebrated Lothario.
As a child, she says, she only cared about horses and show jumping. She was riding at a pony club in Ilkley on one occasion alongside her friend, Jane, whose horse, Geraldine, was refusing to jump over a fence.
“I told her that I’d get the horse to behave. So, I mounted her, and we raced towards the parallel bars, Geraldine skidded to a halt and I was pitched into the bars. I dislocated my arm but, when they put it back, they trapped a nerve and it was paralysed for two years.
“When I recovered, I was too frightened to ride again so I started writing a story set in that world. In the end, it became Riders.” But disaster of a different sort was waiting round the corner. She took the almost completed manuscript with her on a lunch date one day and left it on a bus.
“It was never found. So, I had to write the whole thing again over the next 10 years. Just as well, really – it was much better the second time. That said, if ever I read bits of it now, I blush.” Why? “Because it’s so full of naughty things.”
Next up came Rivals set in the world of television. In the meantime, “although I’m not really allowed to talk about it”, Disney+ recently filmed an eight-episode mini-series of Rivals starring Aidan Turner, Danny Dyer, David Tennant and Katherine Parkinson.
