Shame on snobs who sneer at Jilly Cooper

Once, on a holiday flight, I’m ashamed to say I wrapped Jilly cooper’s novel Wicked! inside the dust cover of Roy Jenkins’s biography of churchill. I didn’t want fellow passengers to know what I was really reading.

On my bookshelves at home, dog- eared but treasured copies of her bonkbusters are hidden behind rows of other more ‘highbrow’ books so that no one can see them.

I am a Jilly fan. I can’t get enough of her saucy roll-in-the-hay storylines full of handsome cads and horse sweat and love, lust and revenge.

Yet I’ve always been ashamed to admit it. Until now, that is.

Because a cambridge don has just claimed her writing is as good as charles Dickens. Dr Ian Patterson, unable to face academic texts last year when his wife was dying, read Jilly’s bestseller Rivals after a friend recommended some good oldfashioned escapism.

‘It was exactly the sort of narrative, for me, at that moment,’ he said. ‘Absorbing, distracting, elegant enough, silly enough and, in a strange way, affectionate.’

He is not the only one. John Sutherland, emeritus professor of modern english literature at University college London, has confided: ‘Wild horses wouldn’t get me to say this in public, but I am rather partial to Jilly cooper.’ Jilly’s sold 11 million novels. And it’s her success that infuriates literary snobs the world over.

Pretentious writers complain her characters are shallow. The po-faced Pc brigade say it’s soft porn, there’s too much about the upper classes, and women are treated as sex objects. But they’d love Jilly’s sales.

It’s the same with Agatha christie — outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare — who’s undergoing a revival because she tells good stories which are perfect for TV.

The Guardian’s high priestess of political correctness Polly Toynbee, sneers at christie’s books because they are ‘suffused with a peculiar english snobbery’. But people like her are the real snobs. When christie got her cBe in 1956, she said: ‘I feel it’s one up to the Low Brows’.

So let’s damn the literary elitists like Toynbee, let them plough through unreadable Booker Prize nominees — the ‘grim lit’ that focuses on death, depression and drugs, or heartbreak, homelessness and havoc.

And let’s wallow in Jilly’s uplifting bonkbusters — safe in the knowledge that academics are closet fans, too.