Simply super! Jilly Cooper showed me how to live life to the full

I adored Jilly Cooper. Everyone I met who read her did. The words “Jilly Cooper” were inevitably followed by a gleam of pure joy in their eye that reached back to being 13, when she took countless teenage girls (and their mothers) to glamorous worlds and then, brilliantly, showed us how unglamorous all people are when they’ve laddered their tights or cut their fringe with bacon scissors.

My friend and I formed a book club devoted to Jilly 10 years ago – it’s still going. We were so fed up with people dismissing her when she was so clever and emotionally literate and such a genius for character study. In turn, we made friends we never otherwise would have met who have become cornerstones in our lives. To my mortification, when The Jillies went on a Christmas special of Only Connect last year, we got the Jilly question wrong – a question written by another Jilly fan, Victoria Coren-Mitchell (favourite book: Imogen, 1978).

I never in a million years thought we would end up lunching with Cooper. I might as well have lunched with oxygen, or the sun. I’d made a sweatshirt with her name on it, in the style of sports teams, and wore it to see India Knight interviewing her in 2016. During the audience Q&A at the end, I mentioned our book club, and she said: “You will all come and see me, won’t you?” And we did go to her lovely house in Bisley, Gloucestershire, three times. We took her a sweatshirt of her own with her name on it.

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I think Jilly’s family thought we were all insane, but Jilly loved having a book club: “My fan club”, as she called us, and really, the line was very thin. Here we were, a group of Jilly encyclopaedias drawn from all worlds – corporate, civil service, finance, journalism, the law, and all fluent in Jilly. She and her PA, Amanda Butler, (immortalised with Jilly in her cameo scene in the excellent Disney+ series Rivals), were so kind to us, feeding us endless champagne and a boozy fruit salad that could take down a village.

Jilly was also so kind to me about infertility just before I went on to my second failed cycle of IVF, talking to me about the miscarriages and adoptions that led her to generously put her own experience into her main characters – the only truly blockbusting author I can think of to make infertility such a plot point in such glamorous stories.

I dedicated my subsequent book to her and, when we returned to Bisley this June, apologised for bringing coals to Newcastle. Jilly’s house was packed with books, framed pictures and evidence of a busy, loved life. Any kind of mention in the press was greeted with a handwritten card that took about three days to decipher.

Jilly Cooper was a journalist herself: a star columnist and features writer at the Sunday Times and the Mail on Sunday who was still never secure of how people felt about her. She interviewed Margaret Thatcher three times, and was a seasoned and brilliant political interviewer, the spiritual ancestor of Marina Hyde. I dearly hope that the book club helped her to realise more how she was appreciated and how much she inspired us to live well, fully and with joy.

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She was a journalist to her core: everything rooted in reality and then made golden. What we adored, other than the wit, the glamour and the wonderful way she drew men, was the world Jilly made. It was instantly recognisable from the fact that everyone could quote, and loved, poetry; that the tabloids avidly covered classical music; and that village am-dram could put on a full-scale opera. (RIP the Paradise production of The Merry Widow, almost certain not to make it into season two of Rivals.)

A political journalist who got hooked on Rivals the TV series, and then the book, asked me for another recommendation, saying that he thought her writing was in the same genre as Dickens and Thackeray, and felt “surprisingly sad” about her death. I felt unsettled all yesterday, seeing her face as the main story on every newspaper website in Britain. A friend in New Zealand messaged me to say she heard the news on the way to work.

Jilly’s writing was revolutionary without her even meaning it to be: Jilly wrote what she saw. To my generation, going through school under Section 28, Jilly’s novels brought us gay and lesbian characters that were as fully realised and flawed as anyone, rather than being The Only Gay In The Novel. Her books were filled with dyslexic characters, or those who hadn’t been any good at school but had flourished anyway. The only “bad” characters lacked imagination, were snobs, or didn’t like animals: a good rule for life.

One of our book club, Andrea Colvile, died of a rare liver disease two years after our first visit to Bisley; her mother said to me, on hearing the news of Jilly’s death: “I’m sure Andrea will greet her, two glasses of champagne in hand.” Oh, how I hope so. And with all Jilly’s animals running along in tow: a life well lived – and even more loved.