Dame Jilly Cooper has left an £8.5 million fortune to her family, according to probate records. The writer, known for her “bonkbusters” including Riders, Rivals and Polo, died at the age of 88 after sustaining a fatal head injury during a fall at her Gloucestershire home in October last year.
Probate Records Reveal Estate Details
Probate records show she left a gross estate of £9,070,307, with a net value of £8,557,118. Her beneficiaries, including children Felix and Emily and her stepdaughter Laura Cooper, will all receive an equal share of the fortune. Records show probate was granted on June 18 2026.
Literary Legacy and Rutshire Chronicles
Dame Jilly’s first novel in the Rutshire series, Riders, was published in 1985 and made the BBC list of 100 important English language novels in the love, sex and romance selection alongside Jane Austen’s Pride And Prejudice. Her hit titles also include Mount! and The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous, along with her most recent work Tackle!
One of the signatories on Dame Jilly’s documents lists her profession as a polo player – apt given the writer devoted her professional life to stories about the polo playing members of the aristocracy. Dame Jilly was known for her steamy fiction focusing on scandal and adultery in upper-class society.
TV Adaptation Success
Rivals, the TV adaptation of Dame Jilly’s Rutshire Chronicles, has been a huge success for Disney+ and stars David Tennant, Emily Atack, Aidan Turner, Katherine Parkinson, Danny Dyer and Alex Hassell. The most recent series also featured cameos from Hayley Atwell and Rupert Everett.
Personal Connections and Tributes
Dame Jilly was a long-standing friend of the Queen, and based her fictional seducer and showjumping lothario Rupert Campbell-Black partly on her ex-husband Andrew Parker Bowles. Her agent Felicity Blunt paid tribute at the time her death was announced, saying Dame Jilly had “defined culture, writing and conversation since she was first published over 50 years ago.”
“You wouldn’t expect books categorised as bonkbusters to have so emphatically stood the test of time, but Jilly wrote with acuity and insight about all things – class, sex, marriage, rivalry, grief and fertility,” she said.
