Jilly Cooper: the Dickens of our time?

She has written more than 40 books and sold more than 11 million copies in Britain alone, said Alice Vincent in The Daily Telegraph, “but Jilly Cooper has rarely been relished by the literary establishment”. However, a Cambridge don has now written a lengthy appreciation of the 80-year-old’s works in the London Review of Books. Ian Patterson explains that he only discovered her novels a year ago, when his wife was dying and he found himself unable to focus on academic texts. A friend pressed a copy of Rivals into his hand and it proved to be just what he needed: “absorbing, distracting, elegant enough, silly enough and, in a strange way, affectionate”. Patterson proceeded to work his way through the entire Jilly Cooper canon. He not only enjoyed the books, he also found that their sprawling casts and interweaved subplots reminded him of such literary greats as Anthony Trollope and Dickens.

“Patterson’s words have been met with howls of derision,” said Camilla Long in The Sunday Times, but they come as no surprise to those of us who have long referred to Cooper as “the Dickens of sex”. The two authors have a shared ability “to glamorise even the vilest of men, revelling in a parade of gnarled, priapic, dirty hustlers and sociopaths. While Bill Sikes is ‘scowling’ and has ‘soiled’ breeches, Rupert Campbell-black is ‘menacing’ and has a ‘filthy’ Rolls-royce.” Mount!, the latest in Jilly’s Rutshire Chronicles series, features a character nicknamed “Mr Bulging Crotchester” who “could easily have come from Dickens”.

The “po-faced PC brigade” despise Cooper’s books as class-obsessed “soft porn”, said Amanda Platell in the Daily Mail. Agatha Christie – “outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare” – attracts similar scorn. The Guardian’s Polly Toynbee says Christie’s books are “suffused with a peculiar English snobbery”. But it’s the critics who are the real snobs. When Christie got her CBE in 1956, she said: “I feel it’s one up to the Low Brows.” Let literary elitists plough through their turgid Man Booker Prize nominees. The rest of us can “wallow in Jilly’s uplifting bonkbusters – safe in the knowledge that academics are closet fans too”.