Racy novelist admits she didn’t take own marriage advice

WHEN Jilly Cooper was asked to write a guide to how to stay married, she was 32 and had been wed eight years.

But now, after re-reading the book for the first time, the author has said she feels “foolish” for offering “smug and opinionated” relationship advice.

The 81-year-old admitted she did not follow the rules in her 1969 bestseller How To Stay Married, which insisted a good wife could not ignore her husband’s amorous approaches more than twice in a row or risk him straying.

In the book, the author, who went on to pen a series of racy novels, also advised that a wife must wash, clean and cook for her husband, even if she has a career.

Describing how she “nearly died of horror” after reading the book five decades on, Cooper said: “What a smug, opinionated, proselytising little know-it-all I was. More shamingly, I have never practised what I preached.

“I advocated total honesty about money being essential in marriage and that ‘couples should always know what the other is spending’.

“That, from a wife who regularly smuggled new clothes into her wardrobe, ripping off the price tag and lying, ‘This old thing?’”

Cooper, who has sold more than 11 million books in Britain, said that, despite declaring “no wife has the right to go to seed”, she could often be found “not washing my hair for days, hairy ankles sprouting out from ragged tracksuit bottoms” while working on her novels.

Writing in The Lady magazine, she said: “Yet not a word did I add urging husbands to exert selfcontrol to avoid a beer belly.

“In mitigation, I suppose I was writing in a different age. No one had dreamt up ‘new men’ or paternity leave, and twocareer marriages were a rarity, particularly if the couple had children.”

The novelist married publisher Leo Cooper in 1961. The couple adopted two children and stayed together until his death in 2013 at