Jilly Cooper: I’m purring over my CBE

AUTHOR and journalist Jilly Cooper – best known for her racy novels – received a CBE for services to literature and charity.

She told the Daily Mail: ‘I haven’t been able to tell anyone but I’ve been purring away to myself. It’s amazing.

‘I’ve been writing it after my name to see what it looked like, “Jilly Cooper CBE”, and it’s lovely. I’m so thrilled, and my family are absolutely knocked out.’

Mrs Cooper’s tales of love, sex and romance among the upper-middle classes have long enthralled readers and the 80-year-old has sold more than 11million books in Britain.

Her writing career began in 19 6 when she got a job as a reporter on the Middlesex Independent, before moving to public relations. She was sacked from 22 jobs before ending up in book publishing.

Her first book, How To Stay Married, was written in 1969 and she has since penned or helped to write 41 other books.

Mrs Cooper, a mother of two, received an OBE in 2004 and was widowed in 2013. She once wrote a guide to dinner parties, which advised getting all the guests so drunk that they forgot about the food.