The style & technique of JILLY COOPER
Tony Rossiter examines the glamorous world and racy prose of the Rutshire Chronicles
Tony Rossiter
Journalist and author of more than two dozen non-fiction books, she is best known for her long romantic novels – notably the Rutshire Chronicles which began with Riders (1985). She had completed the first version of this in 1970, but left the manuscript on a London bus; it took her more than a decade to start it again.
How she began
Jilly Sallitt began her journalistic career as a junior reporter on The Middlesex Independent, where she worked from 1957 to 1959. From there she moved into public relations, followed by a series of what she has described as ‘endlessly awful jobs’ from which she was constantly getting the sack because her typing was not up to scratch. In London she met Leo Cooper (they’d known each other as children in Yorkshire), now a publisher, and they married in 1961.
Always wanting to write, she began as a teenager with ‘awful Pony Club rubbish’ before moving on to romances. Her big break came in 1968 when she met the editor of The Sunday Times colour magazine, Godfrey Smith, at a dinner party and regaled him with the details of her life as a young wife. As she put it in an interview, ‘I said one went to work, shopped through one’s lunch hour, came back, ironed shirts, cleaned the flat, cooked dinner, made love all night, the flat got dirtier and dirtier and one died with exhaustion after six months.’ He enjoyed her humorous chatter so much that he asked her to write a piece for the magazine. This led to a regular column, which in turn led to the publication of her first book, How to Stay Married (1969), a humorous romp through married life, including rows, DIY and, of course, sex. The column, which she always redrafted many times (up to fifteen, she said), ran from 1969 to 1982, when she moved to The Mail on Sunday.