Jilly Cooper

BBC Radio 4 Extra remembers some of the desert island castaways who we lost in 2025.

Writer Jilly Cooper is castaway by Kirsty Young.

Her long writing career spans newspaper columns for the Sunday Times and the Mail on Sunday, non-fiction books on class, marriage and animals in war and novels that sell in their millions. Her romances set in the late seventies - including 'Bella', 'Harriett', 'Imogen' and 'Prudence' – were followed by 'Riders' in 1985, the first of her Rutshire Chronicles. Set mainly in the Cotswolds, they are racy and raunchy page-turners exposing the scandalous – and often hilarious - goings on among the British upper classes.

Born in 1937 in Essex, she was brought up in Yorkshire and enjoyed a happy childhood surrounded by dogs and ponies. At boarding school she earned the nickname, ‘the unholy terror’ and having failed to get into Oxford and being sacked from a number of jobs for her inability to type, she turned to journalism before publishing her first book, 'How to Stay Married' in 1969.

She married Leo Cooper in 1961 and, unable to have children of their own, the couple adopted Felix and Emily in the late 1960s. The couple were married for 52 years before his death in 2013.

Jilly Cooper died on 5th October 2025 aged 88.

DISC ONE: Dietrich Fischer‐Dieskau and Gerald Moore - Franz Schubert’s Das Wandern
DISC TWO: Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer - Something Good
DISC THREE: John Lill and the Hallé Orchestra, conducted by James Loughran - Johannes Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor, Op. 15
DISC FOUR: Elvis Presley – Can’t Help Falling in Love
DISC FIVE: Chicago Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Daniel Barenboim - Richard Strauss’s Des Helden Weltflucht und Vollendung
DISC SIX: Bob Marley - Buffalo Soldier
DISC SEVEN: Roderick Elms and the London Symphony Chorus with the London Symphony Orchestra - Felix Mendelssohn’s He, Watching Over Israel, Slumbers Not
DISC EIGHT: Band of HM Coldstream Guards – Here’s to the Heroes

CASTAWAY'S FAVOURITE: Roderick Elms and the London Symphony Chorus with the London Symphony Orchestra - Felix Mendelssohn’s He, Watching Over Israel, Slumbers Not
BOOK CHOICE: The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations
LUXURY CHOICE: A sack of nuts

Producer: Cathy Drysdale

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2016.