Dame Jilly Cooper, who has died at 88, had a remarkable career, turning herself from a sparkling writer for newspapers into the author of novels which survive, decades after they came out, very well. Few of the huge bestsellers of their day are read 40 years on – The Manxman, Peyton Place, Valley of the Dolls, Scruples all faded away. When one of Dame Jilly’s 1980s novels, Rivals, was filmed in 2024, it didn’t revive a forgotten favourite: like almost all her other novels, it had never disappeared from readers’ affections. Her books stand every chance of turning, in time, into classics of our literature.

What makes the novels work so well is that her characters start to speak, and you remember them

Cooper’s novels fall into two groups. The first, a series of shorter, often very charm

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