British author Jilly Cooper, famous for novels of sex and snobbery, dies at 88

LONDON (Reuters) -Jilly Cooper, the British author of novels such as "Rivals" and "Riders" whose 1980s best-sellers were a blend of sex, satire and British snobbery, has died aged 88, her agent Curtis Brown said in a statement on Monday.

Cooper sold 11 million copies of her books in Britain alone. From the mid-1980s, her raunchy novels depicting the romantic adventures of an upper-class set of characters in the fictional county of Rutshire gained increasing commercial success.

Born in Essex in 1937, Cooper was a newspaper columnist for the Sunday Times in the 1960s, writing about marriage, sex and housework.

She started writing novels in the 1970s, but it wasn't until Riders in 1985 that she had her breakthrough.

At the centre of that book was her character Rupert Campbell-Black, a handsome showjumper and womaniser, and it was her blend of wealthy rural aristocrats bed-hopping alongside sharp observations of Britain's class system which helped make the books so popular.

Rivals found a new generation of fans when it was made into a series for Disney+ in 2024.

A dog-lover, she was married to Leo Cooper in 1961 and they had two children. He died in 2013.

(Reporting by Sarah Young and Sam Tabahriti; Editing by Kate Holton, Alexandra Hudson)