‘Yes, I advised people how to stay married but I never practised what I preached’
Looking back at the advice she offered in her 1969 bestseller makes Jilly Cooper feel rather foolish
WHEN Jilly Cooper published How To
Stay Married in 1969, young women dutifully studied the guide to being the perfect wife.
Women could go out to work, the author explained, provided they rushed home to cook, dust and iron his shirts before preparing dinner – and then “amuse” him in the bedroom.
If they refused sex more than two days running, who could blame the husband for straying?
Half a century on, Cooper has a confession to make about her bestseller.
Not only does she now feel foolish at the way she “merrily laid down the law”, but “shamingly” she didn’t follow the rules herself. She said that re-reading the book for the first time since its publication, she “nearly died of horror”. “What a smug, opinionated, proselytising little know-it-all I was back then,” Cooper said.
“More shamingly, I have never practised what I preached,” she added.
Cooper writes this week in The Lady magazine: “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, lying, ‘This old thing’.”
She also declared in the book that “no wife has the right to go to seed”, but now admits that when working on a novel she can be found “not washing my hair for days, hairy ankles sprouting out from ragged tracksuit bottoms”. “Yet not a word did I add urging husbands to exert self-control to avoid a beer belly,” she says.
And Cooper said she winces at her pronouncement that “if a man is married to a slut” the husband must re- monstrate with her, adding that “women like a firm hand”. She explained: “In mitigation, I suppose I was writing in a different age.
No one had dreamt up ‘new men’ or paternity leave, and two-career marriages were a rarity, particularly if the couple had children.”
At the time she wrote How To Stay Married, ried, Cooper was seven years into her marriage to Leo Cooper. They remained true to the book’s title and did stay married until his death in 2013.
But Cooper was devastated when, in 1990, a publisher’s secretary revealed to The Guardian that she had been Leo’s mistress for years. The woman said she came forward because she was tired of reading the novelist describing her perfect marriage.
The author, whose books including Riders and Rivals, have sold more than 11 million copies in the UK alone, later described the affair as “crucifying” but admitted she had also dallied.
“In the early days of our marriage, I fell madly in love with somebody else and had a fling. Afterwards, Leo just opened his arms and said, ‘Come back’.
“An affair can happen to anybody. I don’t think it’s a reason for a marriage to break up. And nobody really has any idea what goes on between a couple when the door is shut, do they? Often when a husband or wife gets vilified for behaving badly, the other half has been behaving far worse.” She has also said: “I think marriage is an awful lot of luck. Can you imagine the horror, the ghastly horror – better to be in Pentonville, Broadmoor or anywhere – of being stuck with somebody you didn’t like?” In this week’s article, she said that she and Leo would often have blazing rows and she would pack her bags, only for her husband to crack a joke and defuse the anger.
“I still believe a happy marriage is the best thing life has to offer, cemented as much by the moments of irritation as of tenderness. Marriage, for all its limitations, makes people try harder,” she said.
‘I advocated total honesty about money… a wife who regularly smuggled new clothes into her wardrobe’