Backlisted - Imogen by Jilly Cooper

Episode Date: January 21, 2019

John and Andy are joined by author and podcaster Daisy Buchanan and poet and lecturer Dr Ian Patterson to discuss Imogen, Jilly Cooper's 1978 novel of a young librarian finding romance - and all that goes with it - amongst the jet set in the south of France. Also discussed in this episode are the late children's illustrator John Burningham and J.L. Carr's idiosyncratic football yarn How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won The F.A. Cup.Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)6'04 - How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the F.A. Cup by J.L. Carr11'17 - Champagne & Remembering John Burningham, Imogen by Jilly Cooper* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Make your nights unforgettable with American Express. Unmissable show coming up? Good news. We've got access to pre-sale tickets so you don't miss it. Meeting with friends before the show? We can book your reservation. And when you get to the main event, skip to the good bit using the card member entrance.

Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by car and other conditions apply. When you're working out at Planet Fitness, it's a judgment-free zone, so you can really step up your workout. That's why we've got treadmills. And our team members are here to help, so you can be carefree with the free weights.

There are also balance balls, bikes, cables, kettlebells, and TRX equipment. But, like, no pressure. Get started for $1 enrollment and then only $15 a month. Hurry this $1 enrollment sale of Planet Fitness ends July 18th. $49 annual fee applies. See Home Club for details. We were talking earlier on when we were in the pub about the problem of consistent excellence. Yeah.

That if a writer or a filmmaker or a musician just manages to make a series of consistently excellent records or books or films, it almost works against them. My feeling with the Coens is that people look at them and go, ah, yes, another consistently excellent Coen Brothers film. I've already seen half a dozen excellent Coen Brothers films. I'm a huge fan of Inside Llewyn Davis, which came out about five years ago.

For me, if that had been made by other filmmakers, that would be acclaimed as a great, great film about the limits of creativity. But because it was a Coen Brothers film, people go, huh? It's another Coen Brothers film. I think that's interesting. I think there's a body of work there.

I mean, you could say the same thing about, I mean, Bergman or Hitchcock. You know, they're consistently excellent. I mean, both, I think,'s a body of work there. I mean, you could say the same thing about, I mean, Bergman or Hitchcock, you know, consistently excellent. I mean, both, I think, made 50 films. Not all of them may be as good, but the Coen brothers are kind of, I think they're in sort of in that league. You're right that they get maybe taken for granted,

but I think there's always the chance you can go back. When we were in Reykjavik, God, we were still doing this podcast when we were in Reykjavik. We went to the Lebowski Bar in Reykjavik. God, we were still doing this podcast when we were in Reykjavik. We went to the Lebowski Bar in Reykjavik. Brilliant. Oh, it was good. I did have a white rush. Did you ever meet, there's a Dutch publisher called Oscar van Gelderen.

Have you ever met him? No. But he looks just really, really, really similar to Jeff Bridges in that movie. And he has a very, very similar kind of cool, you know, in the way of the Dutch, sort of cool ways of being. He's got a Dutchish kind of, yeah, whatever. We'll have, hey, let's have fun. Let's get fucked up.

But anyway, if Oscar's listening, unlikely. He's a brilliant publisher. And lawyers. He was, as you would expect, the publisher that brought Stoner to the world. Was he? Yeah. Hello Stoner to the world. Was he? Yeah. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. Today you join us stacking books in a dreary public library in a small northern town,

half listening to the buzz of local gossip, hoping that someone impossibly dashing, witty and yet also kind would whisk us all down to the south of France for sun-kissed frolics and romance. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, the platform where readers crowdfund the books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. And joining us today is Daisy Buchanan. Hello. Hello.

Hello, Daisy Buchanan. Daisy's a writer, feminist and regular contributor across TV and radio from Woman's Hour and This Morning to The Guardian, Telegraph, Grazia and The Pool. Daisy's latest book is How To Be Grown Up and is soon to be followed in March by The Sisterhood, a love letter to the women who have shaped me, and that's going to be published by Headline. She is the host of the Your Booked podcast. Brilliant books podcast. On which I have been privileged to appear.

Before Christmas, her and her producer, Dale, came round and invaded my privacy. With my permission. And looked at my bookshelves and passed judgment on them. We've been in your shed, Andy. You have been in my shed. But the podcast is really brilliant, backlisted listeners you don't know your book it's people talking about their bookshelves their book collections yes it's about people's formative reading memories

and the books in their life and what i really really hope to do whether or not i succeed heaven knows but to describe books are sort of loved touched fondled objects now i can't believe i said fondled this early on before the discussion daisy was keen for me to tell you that she is a proud member of the jilly cooper book club many of whom judging by the response on twitter today are backlisted listeners i must say the spike in people going extraordinary saying how excited they were we were doing jilly cooper and da Daisy has been to Jilly Cooper's house. So we're also joined by Ian Patterson, who is a former secondhand bookseller.

I am. A recovering academic. Also true. And a practising poet. Certainly so. He taught English for almost 20 years at Queen's College, Cambridge. Ian's latest poetry collection, Bound to Be, was published by Equipage in 2017.

And his poem, The Plenty of Nothing, an analogy for his late wife, the writer Jenny Diskey, was the winner of the 2017 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. Ian, you wrote a long essay about Jilly Cooper, which was published in the LRB in 2017, I think, yes. And you too have been to Jilly Cooper's house. Yes, I have. Jilly wrote to me and invited us to lunch, Olivia and I,

to lunch after she had read it, which is very flattering and was a very enjoyable occasion indeed. Because you got into the telegraph, it was thoroughly... You'd actually because you hadn't really compared it exactly to Dickens and you sort of did. It wasn't just the Telegraph it was about seven papers.

It was a mad it went viral the story. And it said Cambridge Don compares bonking Gilly to Oscar and Dickens. Austin and Dickens. Oscar and Dickens. I'm bonking as if she's in a constant state of frottage. Yes, absolutely.

At least. Yes, well, you probably gathered what we're here to talk about. We are, in fact, here to talk about Gilly Cooper. But it's a specific, we're at least using one Gilly Cooper to jumpstart, which I'm sure will be a more general discussion of her oeuvre. It's Imogen, first published by Arlington Books in 1978, although most famously the paperback, I think, that came out in 79. It was the fifth in her now legendary series of seven romances, published between 1975 and 1981. So it's now the customary question, Andy, what have you been reading this week?

I've been reading a novel by J.L. Carr and long-term listeners to this podcast will recall that the very first episode of Backlisted was about J.L. Carr's novel a month in the country and in my real and occasionally private life I have attempted to read one J.L. Carr novel a year since we did that podcast. Because if you remember, John, one of the things about J.L. Carr, which is fascinating as a writer, is he never wrote the same novel twice.

And in fact, although you can recognise certain tropes repeating, if you read a few of them, nevertheless, they tend to be very different from one another he tended to find an event in his own life that he would then work out from imaginatively and he was a publisher as well as i said on the podcast i remember buying books from him when he came into the shop in like 1993 when he was hand selling copies of Harpole and Foxborough anyway the novel of his that I read was How Steeple Seen to Be Wanderers won the FA Cup which as you will appreciate was quite a reach for me because it's about football and as the author of a book about

how much I dislike sport I thought well I'll give this a go and of course it's wonderful and several people said to me well it's not really about football it is about English country life, it is about English country life but let's not kid ourselves it is about football

there is a spoiler in the title as well they do win the FA Cup so I'm giving nothing away. But what I would say about it is it's one of his more straightforwardly funny novels. It's quite slight, but it has all those beautiful breaks into lyricism, which I think other novelists would find it quite difficult to manage the contrast. He does this very brilliant thing, a bit like Beryl Bainbridge. difficult to manage the contrast.

He does this very brilliant thing, a bit like Beryl Bainbridge. He does this really brilliant thing of managing to balance character against situation to give something melancholy, funny but melancholy, I think. There's also that kind of football nostalgia, which I know you don't massively indulge in, but the kind of, you know, the old, you know, jumpers for goalposts, leather, heavy leather footballs. The book, weirdly, that reminded me of it when I read it right back

when we did the podcast, so of course my memory of it is slight now, but I've been enjoying it a lot, was it reminded me of Best in Edwards. Oh, that's a good book. There are bits about the Duncan Edwards story. Gordon Byrne. And kind of provincial English football and the kind of the culture of the game that he captures. As you say, it's about rural life,

but it is also about football culture. I thought what I would do is instead of reading an excerpt from How Steeple Seem to Be Wanderers won the FA Cup, I'd just read the blurb because we like blurbs on this podcast. And JL Carr wrote these blurbs himself, of course. This is an edition published by his publisher, the Quincy Tree Press. So I'll just read you how J.L. Carr wanted you to think of this novel. This is how the blurb starts. book writing can be a tedious job needing some incentive to keep one at it the impulse here was can this unbelievable feat be made to sound like the truth even though it didn't happen so i stacked the cards a foreigner with remarkable theories two young men with good reasons for

having quit top class football a chairman of napoleonic. Then I dredged up memories of 1930 when I was an unqualified teacher, 18 years old and playing that single season for South Milford White Rose, when we won a final which never ended. Pitch invasion and furious fights are not new things. I learned much of rural life during that long-gone autumn, winter and early spring. But is this story believable? Ah, it all depends upon whether you want to believe it. J.L. Carr, 1992, for instance. Wow, what an extraordinary blurb.

Doesn't that make you want to read the book? Absolutely. J.L. Carr, no no fool i would suggest that and the other thing is that there is a kind of harmonic resonance with a month in the country because you feel that a lot of the detail of his understanding and feel for rural life that that book is is full of is is also there in in sindeby i'm not going to read it but he does a similar fabulous thing as in a month in the country where he holds something back for the last page and he does a kind of switch on the last page which is extremely moving and makes you feel like what you've been reading while it's been presented

to you as quite light has in fact meant a lot more to the person telling you the story than you might at first have thought. So I strongly recommend that. How Steeple Seen to Be Wanderers won the FA Cup by JL Carr, now published, in fact, by Penguin Modern Classics. There is a Penguin Modern Classics edition. John, what have you been reading this week? Well, I've decided to talk about this week,

not a single book, but a whole lifetime. Very sad, I announced this week, the death of John Birmingham, who John Birmingham is one of the, I think, giants of children's book writing and illustration came to prominence 1964 with his book, Borka, The Goose Without Feathers, and has since then, right until the very end produced remarkable books beautiful visual rich books very funny dry wry witty stories and I had the great fortune to almost publish his last book and we worked very hard on a book of his called Champagne

and we're about to open some Champagne too but one of the great things about John was if whenever you went to see him, there would be champagne on the go. I'm pretty sure that wasn't just because he was doing the book. He loved it. I remember going to see him. It was a long and complicated story as to why, but he couldn't find a publisher for the book, which seemed incredible,

having been one of the great. He lives in Hampstead, a wonderful rambling house with his wife, who's also a genius of the genre, Helen Oxenbury. And always champagne open. And he came and the whole book, which is here, the whole book was already done, really. It was just all on a wall. He said, I finished my wall.

So he said, if the wall's finished, then book's finished, really. Just need to find a way of getting it printed. Anyway, long story short, we couldn't quite do it on unbound but i worked with his wonderful uh designer ian craig who had been back at random house children's books for many years the book was laid out by john and ian together and it came out it came out uh it came out last year and i brought a few of my favorites in or get off my train i get off our train and oh john patrick norman mckennessy the book who was always late but i also brought in this incredibly beautiful uh autobiography which is full of and there's apart from amazingly lovely photographs of of uh of john and helen when they were younger running around on on Vespas in Europe.

There is his very dry gloss on his own books. There's a wonderful foreword by Maurice Sendak. I think Maurice Sendak. Maurice. Maurice, of course, Maurice Sendak. And then on the back, there's a brilliant thing from Raymond Briggs as well saying, that said, Birmingham is a blooming nuisance. He should retire now.

After all, he's very old. But no doubt he will go on and on doing yet more brilliant stuff, Raymond Briggs. You've got there Courtney about the dog. Oh, Courtney. This is just the most wonderful. So this was published in the early 90s. And I don't want to give the ending away.

It's what the dog gets up to in the story 90s. I don't want to give the ending away because it's wonderful. It's what the dog gets up to in the story. Courtney is a dog. And this is what he says about the story. He says that Courtney must be loosely based on our dog Stanley, who was probably a cross between a Labrador and a Border Collie. All the animals we've ended up as characters in stories sooner or later. And he does the best dogs, the best animals.

I bought Stanley from a pet shop in Hastings. He was very likely a result of some liaison between a couple of curs around the fishing huts on the beach. We used to talk to him in a North Country accent, which really had no logic. There are lots of things going on in this story, says John. The parents have an obsession with racial purity and are determined that the new pet should be a thoroughbred. The father is suspicious of this male who has come into the house and the mother develops a closer relationship with the dog

than with her husband. I just love his work. It seems appropriate then, given that John Birmingham's champagne and the subject of this week's podcast, Jilly Cooper, that John is about to... Oh! And this is, I'm sure, very relatable for people at home as we sit here quaffing champagne

when you listen to this at seven o'clock on a Monday morning. Enjoy your dry January, kids. Yeah. Anyway, shall we toast? Well, we have John Birmingham's fabulous last book that was finally printed, Champagne in Front of Us, but I think he would have loved the idea that we toast him on air. So here's to John Birmingham.

Birmingham. Well said. I have to raise an Any Other Business issue, which is to say that I will be interviewing Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Andrew Sean Greer about his novel Less, which is a great favourite of ours, at Backlisted. We talked about it on the podcast last year.

It's one of my favourite books of last year. I will be interviewing him at Waterstones Piccadilly on Monday, February the 4th. So if you're in london and you feel like coming along and listening to andrew be brilliant about his wonderful novel please come along we'll be back in just a sec now to the matter in hand should we start with the usual question, Andy? Yeah. So turning to Julie Cooper and specifically to Imogen, Daisy, can you remember when you first read this book, this novel, Imogen? I'm pretty sure I would have been about 13 or 14

in an area of my school called the Small Hall, which was really a canteen but they wanted to kind of push up and I read Riders and Rivals and The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous but this I remember thinking was about Gilly really getting teenagers and everyone else in Gilly's other books which I'd love they all seemed fantastically glamorous and to live lives entirely unlike mine and Imogen was a girl who worried about her weight and worried that she was a bit boring and worked in a library and longed for someone glamorous to sort of come in and change it and I thought Gilly is writing my life

where is this sexy tennis player? He's clearly nowhere in the small hall. We had a slightly creepy gardener who got fired who I think would have whisked in and done the job but it wasn't quite the same. Ian, Gilly Cooper,

when did you first read or encounter Gilly Cooper's work? Well, I wasn't really a teenager in any real sense. I was more like 66. I didn't know about Jilly Cooper, and I had read her columns in the Sunday Times when I were nobber to lad, and enjoyed them very much.

But I never actually thought that I would enjoy her books. But when Jenny was ill and everything seemed pretty dreadful, I wasn't really able to concentrate on the sort of reading I ought to have been doing. And Olivia actually said, you ought to read Jilly Cooper and pressed a Jilly Cooper into my hand. And I said, oh God, no, I couldn't do that. And she said, go on, just try it. And I did. And I couldn't stop. and I did, and I couldn't stop.

I was completely captivated, partly because it was so much more captivating than I had imagined it would be, and partly because there was nothing else, really. So I just read and read and read and read and read. And did you start with the later, sexier books? I started with, I think, Rivals. Okay. start with the later i started with i think rivals okay um but i quite soon moved on to i think harriet was probably the first and then prudence and then imogen and so on because they

were so undemanding in some ways and in some ways in ways. And also, in the big books, as one might think of them, those serious weighty tomes like, you know, Riders and Rivals, there's all sorts of grown-up stuff that I might have identified with or failed to identify with. But in these romances, it's like Shakespeare's Last Place or something. It's just a kind of little magical fantasy world where everything is... Yeah, or sort of bar preludes.

There's some sort of purity about it. That's absolutely the word I was going for, purity. There are no distractions to the action. I will say, not to... Because I know we're talking about the romances and I think listeners are probably familiar with, according to Twitter, familiar with it all but especially

with the word on the tip of my tongue is bonk busters but there we are. But I do love the, I guess, sort of the 80s because it's quite Judith Crancy as well isn't it, like business and you know, board meetings and people bursting into

rooms and having fabulous business ideas and I find that really really good fun Rivals is about a television franchise and when I read it I had no idea I thought ITV was just ITV and I had no idea there were regional variations that people bid for and consortiums so that was you know a lot as well as a sex education there's quite a lot of oh that's how telly works but um imogen and octavia and harriet and prudence and those books they're a world that maybe wasn't exactly familiar to me but it felt like something that i could know and i could appreciate i've got a blurb to read here which is the jacket flap on a republication of Imogen from the I think this is like an early 80s edition you can see Gilly's on the front it says Gilly Cooper her Riviera

romance Imogen now I don't want to objectify our esteemed author but can we talk about how absolutely stunning Gilly looks on that cover that beautiful photo on all these covers this looks incredible. I mean, what a brave and extraordinary thing to do. I was never quite sure. I always assumed it was her on the cover. She's on the cover of all these 70s romances. This is the blurb that went out on this book, right?

And, well, I'll just read it to you and then you can tell me what you think. Girls like Imogen, tied to dreary jobs in provincial towns, are apt to dream of romantic escapes to sun-drenched beaches and to conjure up visions of ultimate bliss in the bronzed arms of the athletic heroes of their nighttime fantasies. Seldom, however, do they have to face up to their dreams coming true. coming true. In Imogen, a rustic Yorkshire ingenue finds her dreams coming true rather faster

than she can cope with them. How she parries the advances of Nicky Beresford, the lecherous tennis ace, and copes with the gropes of the rest of the Riviera drones will bring a warm glow of reassurance to all those nervous mums whose daughters' tender bosoms have been overexposed to the Saint-Tropez sun. Whoever wrote this, my cap is off to you. Imogen's adventures, as told by Gilly, are totally realistic

in spite of the fact that, unmoved by modern conventions, she is a girl who does not regard her virginity as something to be lightly thrown away. Gilly's account of a sensitive girl's not regard her virginity as something to be lightly thrown away. Gilly's account of a sensitive girl's approach to her own crisis of conscience in the face of a libidinous and totally materialistic society is handled with that subtlety and delicacy which distinguishes all her work. Very good. That's really good. At this point, I'm going to bring in our producer, Nicky Birch.

Now, Nicky, when did you first read a Jilly Cooper book? Probably when travelling in some hostel. You know, you have one of those books that you just pick up because it's the only one there, and that was probably for riders. But I can't really remember it very clearly. And you hadn't read this before this week, had you? I hadn't read Imogen before this week. And what did you make of it?

At first, my jaw was dropped to the floor I think I was really I was like I tweeted both of you were like WTF OMG you did FFS yeah my immediate reaction is I'm so excited to hear what you guys say about this but um it was basically because the treatment of women just shocked me completely. It's like, wow, the last 50 years, we have actually come on a really long way. I think the thing, Nicky, I found, we'll talk about this, the thing that was brilliant. So you sent me and John a message that said, what, what, what, what? And then 24 hours later, you sent me another message saying,

I think I'm going to read another one. She gets you, right? you right I was totally locked in I didn't do anything else apart from read Jilly Cooper for 24 hours so hand in heart it was fun I suppose I was just shocked by some of the things you're going to talk about in the book

are you serious? Domestic violence in passion? That's okay? You know, things like that I found really difficult. We'll come on to this. This is very interesting. And I think one of the things that I found very interesting coming to the book, having not read it before,

there are things in the books which are, you know, as we're always saying, of their time. Yep. When my wife, Mrs. Tina Miller, discovered, she doesn't normally listen to bat listy because she because she thinks it encourages me so but when she found out we were doing these books she said this jilly's 1970s romance is bella emily harriet imogen lisa and co octavia and the best one prudence were my favorite books as a teenager and i read them all numerous times as Andy will attest I can recall each one

in forensic detail my very favourite was Prudence with the cold fish Pendle Mull Holland dashing older brother Ace and sexy younger brother Jack I re-read this Imogen and the short stories these from go over Christmas and whilst in some

ways they've dated I suspect someone may have done an editorial clean-up in the 90s to remove a few colloquialisms we might not use today. I thought how fortunate I was to read these books at the right age. Sort of what you're saying, Daisy, isn't it? They are romantic, funny, literate, sexy but not too sexy, and best of all, the heroines are real girls with real girls' bodies, hair, aspirations and problems problems at least within jilly's enchanted settings i also thought what a debt helen fielding owes to these books yeah but what i like best about them hasn't really dated at all jilly's

message to her readers which is just be yourself yep what do you think days do you think, Daisy? Do you think they, I mean, you know, there are things in them that we might look twice at now, but that stuff feels very current, doesn't it? It really does. I will say, I think I'm about, on a good day, three stone heavier than a fat Julie Cooper heroine. The weights, you know, that's the one thing that still troubles me i know there are plenty of other really problematic things that should trouble me more but i'm like oh god but what i really love about the way she writes and the observations she makes and i think this is perhaps one of the reasons why jilly and writers kind of in her her school or writers who are linked with her get dismissed

as she's so unremittingly honest and funny about how bloody knackering it is to be a woman and that constant feeling of not looking quite right. I think it might be Fanny in The Procedure of Love by Nancy Mitford says something along the lines of, if you're sort of constantly looking at your reflection, and I'm going to paraphrase horribly in my experience it's not because you think you look great it's because you suspect something is amiss and so much attention is given to you know to clothes and appearance there's a really fabulous makeover in this book and I think I was thinking how interesting it is because the makeover has become it was such a big part of I I guess, sort of 90s teen comedy dramas and so much in cinemas.

And I was thinking, you know, of course, like Clueless is, I think, a film that owes a great debt to Julie Cooper. But of course, obviously, you know, Clueless is Emma. And I think, you know, Jane Austen and Julie Cooper are similar. They're really, really brilliantly bitchy. What I love so much about Jilly is her voice and her tone and her disdain for earnestness. In my Jilly Cooper book club. Hello.

It was so interesting to meet these women. And these women are in there. We're in our broadly 30s and 40s. We're a real range of people. There are lots of journalists like me, but also lawyers, finance experts, people who sort of work in the public sector, people who do really big, important jobs.

You put us all together in a room, you'd know there was something that we had, that we shared. These are women who are irreverent, women who have a sense of humour about themselves, and women who love pleasure, and women who frequently look into shop windows thinking something isn't quite right. You mentioned Austen there.

What I found notable about the way Gilly writes, certainly in these books, is the prose is a really fascinating mixture. It's like a halfway point between Austin and Woodhouse, it seems to me. The prose is often written for the joy of writing the prose. You know, the jokes come out. She likes a pun. She likes a literary reference. She likes to keep the plot bowling along.

She's very good on detail though i mean she's amazingly good she i mean you know she started as a journalist and that one of the things that i've i've read this week that really loved i wanted to try and get some context to when the book was being written and during it was published in 78 she was living in putney and there is a truly fabulous diary called the common years about her life in Putney and dog walking. What you get the sense of is somebody who's, she's living a life, she's writing about it as a journalist. She's also writing, turning it into fiction at the same time. It's all one thing. She's writing about what she knows.

Her research for the books is famously kind of exhausting. And even in the romances, you know, the details of the hotel rooms in Imogen and the meals, it's not product placement, but you get a sense of 70s kind of boutiques on the Riviera. I love Jackie Collins. I love so many writers who are writing commercial women's fiction at this time. But there are, I think, you know, particularly American writers who, they went to the best restaurant and said, I want a bottle of your most expensive champagne

and they had lobster and they had steak and there's none of that in Gilly she is known I think as a writer of glamour but her domestic detail is magnificent and what I love about Imogen is before you go to the Riviera I'd really forgotten how good she is on the detail of the home and the way you know the sort of the parish magazine sort of left crumpled and the you know the vague mum and the being a bit embarrassed because you're not having a joint for Sunday lunch and you're having macaroni cheese and you know the the dog being over familiar and awkward and hiding pants and claiming they're for a jumble sale on their own knickers, laundry that's dropped off a radiator.

I think that's absolutely right. I think her detail is extraordinary. I think it's something that she does share with Jane Austen, who was also writing about the life that she was living at the same time. And Woodhouse has the other side of her, which is the ability to put fantasy into the clearest and most elegant prose. And she combines those two things quite wonderfully, I think,

with a lightness of touch and a capacity to feel as if the novel is being written for you as you read it. She has that thing that, Douglas, this is brilliant. I've said this on Batlister before, but I think about it a lot. It's a really good turn of phrase. Douglas Adams' description of Woodhouse as pure word music. And at her best, you can feel her when she writes getting into kind of that kind of flow where the words are beginning to form this beautiful light

kind of andante of humour. Humour and intelligence kind of pushing the thing along. The great thing about her humour, particularly the puns and the jokes, is that it doesn't matter who articulates them. It's always, in some sense, the authorial character of the prose it's the it's part of the rhythm of the presence of the same person managing the whole thing well we'd like to one if one of you would like to select something to read from jilly's work while you do that let's listen to you were talking about jilly writing about what she knows. This is a clip from Gilly Cooper talking on The Late Late Show in 2016

about how she got started as a writer. I went to a party when I was, a dinner party, and I met this lovely big man with a big laugh, and he said, what was I doing at the moment? So I said, well, I was newly married, and it was quite difficult because I got up in the morning and I went to work, and then I shopped during my lunch hour, got all the things and food, and I went back to work, and then I went home,

and I washed my husband's shirts, I ironed them, I cooked dinner, I cleaned the flat, and then we made love all night, and then I got up in the morning. And the next day I did the same thing I did the same thing again for six months then I died of exhaustion yeah it's a very demanding lifestyle it was it was lovely I was very happy doing it I'm sure you were anyway but it's a very nice way to spend some time it was was nice. I mean, so Godfrey laughed and he said, oh gosh, write about it. And so I did.

And I handed it in. It was in the English Colour magazine, Sunday Times. And then it appeared and I got nine jobs off at that weekend. The thing about Ginny Cooper is, as you can hear from that clip, is, you know, anyone could get a break. Well, not anyone could get a break. But if you get that break, what do you do with that break?

She works really hard break she works really hard she works really hard all the way through the late 60s through the 70s and she's operating at a really high level she's writing a novel a year she's right she's a regular columnist in more than one newspaper she's publishing collection of journalism her diary and she's and she's writing and she's writing fiction and the you know the, the Sunday Times pieces, some of the interviews are just fabulous. I mean, reading her, she did two interviews with Thatcher, both of which... Brilliant.

Brilliant. She did a terribly damaging interview with Neil Kinnock. Did she? Yeah, which is, I mean, unfortunately very funny. But, you know, she talks about the Tory party conference. I mean, this is a proper satire. Ted Heath sat sulking and huffed up like a great gelded tomcat whose mistress has forgotten the whiskers. I mean, she's good.

That's the thing. If you listen to the first Desert Island Discs, it's fascinating to listen to that. She recorded another one in 2016 with Kirsty Young, but the first one was Rory Plumley, where she flirts outrageously with R plumley all the way through but there is a kind of you you do get that sense of she'd only written six books at that stage but she's a fully formed she's a fully formed character i mean she is jilly cooper to all intents and purposes the jilly before she has written all the books that made her famous. And you know what she chose as her Desert Island book?

I do know, but go on. Yeah, it's Anthony Pohl. Ah. With whom she was very friendly, in fact. And quotes, occasionally, certainly in her journalism. I tried to get hold of a copy of her 1980 book, Super Cooper. Yeah, can't get hold of it. So named because Super Trooper by AbBA was in the charts at the time.

So she had an eye. Who wants to read us something from Imogen? Well, I could read a bit. It's chosen pretty much at random. I chose my bits carefully. Well, I forgot to do it, you see. Anyway, it goes something like this. Can I go to the loo, said Imogen, who didn't want to,

but was desperate to repair her face before Nicky could compare her any more with this ravishing creature. Down the passage on the left, said Cable, we'll be in here. Do you think five bikinis will be enough, Nicky? What price Lady J's moth-eaten red bathing dress now, thought Imogen savagely as she combed the tangles out of her hair. Her face was all eyes in a for once pale face. She pinched some of Cable's rouge but it made her look like a clown so she rubbed it off again.

She found Nicky and Cable in a room where everything seemed scarlet. Carpet, curtains and every inch of wall that wasn't covered by books and pictures. Even the piano was painted red and in one corner stood a huge stuffed bear wearing a scarlet regimental jacket. Oh, what a heavenly room, sighed Imogen. Cable looked at her with surprise. Do you think so? Matt's taste, not mine. Detail.

Detail. Detail. Bear and a regimental gentleman. Bears do furnish a room. It's quite Henry Jamesian as well, I think. But there's so little about Cable, but you find out so much about her just from her reaction and her sort of positioning against Imogen and that pushing something on and taking it off again,

being very evocative. Daisy, have you got a bit there that you would like to share with the room? I do. Stop me if this is too long. James Edgeworth had the rosy complexion, puffed out cheeks and curly hair, cherubs that blow the wind at the corner of old maps. He was small, plump and wore a yachting cap and a look of eager expectancy. Let's have a drink, said Nicky. Tomato juice for me, said Yvonne.

Pity to waste it when it's duty-free, said Nicky, giving her one of his hard, sexy looks. Oh well, if you twist my arm I'll have a baby sham, said Yvonne. Everyone else had double brandies. You write for the papers, don't you, said Yvonne. Rather fun, I should think. I was rather good at English at school. They all said I should take up writing. Matt looked at her. It would have been tragic to deprive the modelling world, he said dryly. Imogen suppressed a smile. That's what I thought, said Yvonne. Now I just write jumbo speeches. Speeches? Didn't you know? She bared her teeth like the wolf in Red Riding Hood. James is a prospective candidate for Cockfosters.

He's awfully busy at the moment, but if you ask him nicely, I'm sure he'd spare the time to give you an interview for your paper. I'll remember that, said Matt. Mind you, said Yvonne, I do think the articles you write are rather, well, exaggerated. In what way, said Matt, his eyes narrowing. Well, that piece last week on Northern Ireland. I mean, I didn't finish it. And I know all journalists sensationalise things for the sake of circulation. Go on, said Matt, an ominous note creeping into his voice.

It's just so bitchy and Yvonne doesn't exist. That is her journalism, giving a terrible person enough rope to hang themselves and doing that in the dialogue and the reactions. Again, it's a holiday we've all been on, you know, lumped together with some people you quite like and several people you really don't like. And I think Matt says that, doesn't he? You need that. And that's something I didn't appreciate as a teenage reader,

but I do now. A bit like Hendoo's, where there's always someone who's the worst. And if you're like, everyone seems quite nice. Oh, it's me. Or maybe I'm the worst. You say something in your article, Ian, that really interested me. Because it's her world, and she's kind of controlling it. You know who the good people are. You have no choice but to like Imogen. Is that part of what you think makes it so successful? You know who the good people are. You have no choice but to like Imogen. Is that part of what you think makes it so successful? You know who the bad people are and you know who the good people are, but what you don't know is how they're going to interact.

I think that's right. And I think you don't know how the scenes are going to follow each other. You don't know who's going to go wrong, what's going to fall out of place. And even though you know it'll end happily, you don't. You are sitting on the edge of your seat, metaphorically at least, as you read through it. Because actually, I always feel quite comfortable reading her. I don't actually feel physically uncomfortable. But I do feel kind of mentally a bit agitated about how long this is going to go on until

somebody sees that actually somebody they're in love with is in love with them and they're in love with them, which they haven't noticed. And that really... That's Austin, though, isn't it? It's Austin. It's Woodhouse as well. It's the way in which an imbroglio is created and then disentangled at Shakespeare too.

Not that I'm saying Cambridge Don said it. You heard it here first. But you do say, now you do say in your piece, I think this is worth highlighting because I can see exactly what you mean here, that certainly the later novels, because she's written effectively, this is like a 12-volume roman fleur,

which she might not have intended to start writing, but the same characters recur over a number of decades. It's ended up being like a Dickensian marshalling of… And certainly pole-like, you know. Yeah. We have a clip here of… This is from the Desert Island Discs, John, that you were talking about, from the Desert Island Discs, John, that you were talking about, the

later Desert Island Discs. This is with Gilly telling us why she thinks these particular novels were, the romance novel of the 70s, were so successful. You began writing novels then in the 70s. I was one of those young teenagers who devoured them, names like Emily and Belia, and Harriet and Octavia and Prudence and Imogen. I couldn't get enough of them. I wanted you to write more. At the time, why do you think they were successful? Because they flew off the shelves, those.

I think they were successful because the men were lovely. I mean, the men were very, very attractive. A lot of Leo in the men, but a lot of men I knew. I think if you can be funny and have a glamorous hero at the end, I think it gets people going. Now, Nicky's got her head in her hands after listening to that. See, Jilly thinks it's because of the lovely, lovely men and how they behaved so appallingly that you ladies just can't resist.

Surely, Nicky, you must love Matt. Lovely Irish kind of... Can we talk about the fact that Matt, who is presented as, oh, he's much older than the heroine and he's a bit rugged and can he ever love Imogen because he's loved before and he's got a long past and life and history and he's 32. I know. This struck me quite forcing as I was rereading it yesterday.

I've got a bit here. This is for me. This is my favourite short passage in this novel and it brings together what i think this this unlikely combination that jilly manages in the prose right so imogen it's near the start of the book and imogen has been invited away on holiday by the tennis pro nikki beresford and he's written to her parents saying nothing will happen to your daughter. A deeply, deeply sinister man. Anyway, so Imogen is packing for the holiday.

It's worth saying, isn't it, that Imogen's father is a vicar. Yeah. Yeah. She's naive, but she's no fool. On the eve of her holiday, the mauve packets of the pill were safely tucked into the pocket of her old school coat hanging at the back of her wardrobe. She'd been taking it for eight days now

and she felt sick all the time, but she wasn't sure if it was side effects or nervousness at the thought of seeing Nicky. It was such ages since their last meeting, she felt she'd almost burnt herself out with longing. Then she was worried about the sex side. She'd been taking surreptitious glances at the joy of sex when the library was quiet,

and the whole thing seemed terribly complicated. Did one have to stop talking during the performance like a tennis match? And wouldn't Nicky, accustomed to lithe, beautiful female tennis players, find her much too fat? She put her hot forehead against the bathroom window. In the garden, she could see her father talking to the cat and staking some yellow dahlias beaten down by the rain and wind. That's what I need, she thought wistfully. I'll never blossom properly in life unless I'm tied to a strong, sturdy stake. Hang on, whoa, whoa, hang on. She also packed a pile of big paperbacks. She never got round to reading. Daniel Deronda.

Lark Rise to Candleford. Scott Fitzgerald. And Tristram Shandy. On the bed lay a box of tissues. They don't have the kind of loo paper you can take your makeup off with in France, Miss Hockney had told her, a cellophane bag of cotton wool balls and a matching set of Goya's passport

she had won in the church fate raffle. I think this is the brilliance of, this is what's brilliant about Judy Cooper. This is exactly what my wife was saying about her message to her readers is be yourself. You can be silly and you can also take Tristram Shandy on holiday with you. And we're shown that Imogen has a good go at reading Tristram Shandy before getting bored with it and then deciding she's going to read

The Great Gatsby instead. So I think that seems to me a really positive message about the capabilities of the girls she's writing about. You can do what you want. There is another message, though. Which is? Imogen does not have any point in the story where Imogen isn't constantly thinking about a man.

The only point where she's not thinking about a man is a very key plot point where she rescues a young boy. But there is nothing in the story where she's being passively led by a man is a very key plot point where she rescues a young boy but there is nothing in the story which is being passively led by a man but i think that at the time and even you know to an extent now without wanting to sort of divulge too much personal information someone who was you know my father isn't a vicar but i was brought up by a very strict catholic family and i remember that sort of with my first boyfriend and that the other part I selected to read was when Imogen loses her pill. She's got the pill.

And it's always the pill, isn't it? Not her pills. Her pill, singular. She's left them in a pocket and it gets given to the church jumble sale. And she has to rescue them. And there's a horrible nosy old lady and a kind lady who knows what's going on and makes sure she gets them back. But that, you know, being pushed and pulled, I think that she was a real social chronicler. And I think that it's interesting, perhaps even politically,

Jilly Cooper's writing at a time when women didn't feel as though, you know, their bodies belonged to anyone. They were either being controlled by their parents or being controlled by some man. No, no non-straight people in Julie Cooper. A few tokenistic ones in the later books, they don't turn up here. I think there's a reference to being queer that's not in the 2019 woke sense.

But my goodness, there is a lot that's problematic and tricky and infuriating and upsetting and difficult but i think that it is worth remembering she was a really really brilliant observer of a time she was living in which was really really really progressive in some ways but also shockingly not progressive in others i mean the other thing i'd say nick in response to that what i think is perfectly justifiable criticism is her heroines to use the horrible phrase that we use now have agency she might be thinking about those things but she does what she wants you know the will of the heroines is the thing that pushes out in the end can i talk about have you read um harriet yet so harriet is i think perhaps the book that's perhaps

the most similar to imogen and because other books as well there are heroines that are much much much spikier than imogen i love imogen like i love fanny price and nobody loves fanny price everybody thinks fanny price is really wet and pathetic but as someone who often feels very wet and pathetic I think that's my girl Harriet is set at Oxford Harriet is a student she's beautiful she's shy I believe she's a virgin she is seduced by Simon Villiers Villiers an actor who entrances everybody with his glamour and the fact that he's clearly going on to great things and he fancies a crack at the, you know, the pretty shy girl who turns up at a party and Harriet gets pregnant. Simon wants nothing to do with it. Harriet sort of has the baby, even though everybody's desperate for her not to, leaves in

shame and ends up as a nanny to a glamorous man. Can you guess what's going to happen? But something that really struck me about that, because much is made about the fact that Harriet really enjoys sex, and it's something she's really choosing to do. And she's, for the first time in her life, excited about something that isn't reading and oh god I mean I think I don't think anyone would be upset if I said pretty sure Jilly Cooper likes sex a lot and it seemed possibly not so much now but you know for me at the time as a teenager that seemed like a a revolution and having the

sort of sex education and I was lucky to be of an age when it was there but it was very much god there is another Dylan Moran joke that you know said the 60s being about free love and the Beatles and that's all have a good time and the 80s was don't fuck anyone or you'll die here's MC Hammer it was very much my sex education in the late 90s early years here's everything can go wrong here's everything you'll be afraid of hear all the bad things that could happen and the sole voice in my life that said this is lovely and something that most people do was jilly cooper ian how does jilly Cooper's writing about sex compare with the writing of D.H. Lawrence

about sex? Almost indistinguishable in many ways I don't think they are quite the same I think Lawrence's writing about sex is although there is a kind of lyricism,

sometimes there's also an awful repetitiveness in the way he writes about it. He does just kind of keep on saying the same thing in different times. Disfigured by his metaphysical concerns. Yes, it is a bit disfigured by his metaphysical. It's also disfigured a bit by his physical concerns and constrained somewhat by the limitations on what he can say and get published. I suppose, woman bows, loins, dark, dark. It's really hard work, I think, finding fun in Lawrence's depictions of fun in sex. I suppose one thinks most of Mellers and Connie in Lady Chatterley's Lover, where it is really pedagogic rather than exciting. It's a lesson.

I think I know what you're going to say here, whereas in Gilly, it seems to me, is taking, Gilly is writing in an era where everything is freer. Well, that's certainly true. She is. And also she's writing in an era where it's possible to think of it as a kind of exuberance. Yeah, right. And it's an exuberant pleasure.

It's bawdy in the old sense. It's like the film of Tom Jones. Yeah, I always think with her gap tooth, she has that wife of Bath kind of, you know, that she enjoyed. Oh, that's so funny. I have a friend, Duncan. Hello, Duncan, who said exactly the same thing. That as a young man, he saw Jilly Cooper.

At the time, he was reading the Canterbury Tales at school and Jilly and her gap made quite a profound impression on him. But, you know, we were talking earlier, but, you know, her line still in her 80s, you know, when she meets a man is to say, oh, how lovely to meet you. Gosh, you're good looking. Do you want to go upstairs? I mean, we know that it's a joke, but she says,

well, men don't have compliments paid to them terribly often. As much as Lawrence, to be honest. I mean, if you're looking for solutions to metaphysical problems, Jilly Cooper may not be your writer. But what I do think that she does do, talking to women in the office, you know, who are at various levels, but broadly on the woke scale, mostly woke and quite articulate about that. They love Julie Cooper, because they see her almost in mental health terms, that they find her immensely

comforting. She has a positive moral message to make about the value of sex, and about the value of relationships and the importance of kindness and about the value of relationships and the importance of kindness and the importance of love in relationships and that to be in her world is a very comforting and reassuring she's certainly tina was saying that she said she's a really good author to read at times of stress yeah funnily enough what you were saying you said i read these when i was doing my a levels i sort of would they were they were a a release for me they were a they were a place to go and sort of like woodhouse i mean i think i would have exactly yeah yeah i've got a lovely little bit from the one of her essays for the sunday times but it's she knows what the only other

things is that she's now in her 80s 82 i I think, and so remembers the war. And there's just a little bit about the celebrations at the end of the war. Perched on top was an effigy of Hitler with mad staring eyes, slicked back hair, a little black moustache and a swastika armband. At last the great pyre roared into golden flame. After 2,000 days of blackout, the brilliance was breathtaking. Birds disturbed by the unaccustomed brightness sang their heads off. Insects freaked out, moths bashing against the lights, colossal maybugs bombing us like doodle bugs. Looking across the garden, my mother suddenly stiffened, for there was my father laughing and shoving his hand down a blonde's dress.

But it was only old lady Thornley again again this time her white hair was turned gold by the bonfire and my father was retrieving a maybug from her cleavage but it's classic jilly cooper you know focus paul it's she's she's very very very good comic writer i think there are some great one-liners in imogen my favorite was the one tracy who is the really kind of towwy member of the cast, has gone out with Nicky. And the line, I think, is delivered by Matt, where's the pedalo? I hope Nicky hasn't sunk without Tracy.

Ian, you say in your essay about Gilly that the thing that you got from reading the books, and we shouldn't underestimate this, was pleasure. What are the pleasures that you think Gilly gives to the reader which you wouldn't get from another writer? What is the thing in her work that is so much? I don't know that I go so far as to say there are no other writers that would provide similar pleasures, but I think I'm glad that John said comedy, comic, just now, because I think that comedy is a central element in pleasure because it has a happy ending.

But I think that what she actually manages to provide is not so much, though perhaps to some extent in the bonk busters, guilty pleasures, the pleasures of finding things that you wouldn't elsewhere find said. It's the pleasure of indulging fantasy and at the same time indulging it within quite strictly delimited scenarios which are written in such a way

as to ensure that you can take them seriously within their limits. And at the same time, it's full of jokes. To use the grim phrase, it's a safe space. Yes, it is. A Jilly Cooper novel is a safe space. Please can we talk about parties? Because it's Jilly Cooper's fault that I think I like parties.

This is your last word on the matter. So this is your final statement. Jilly Cooper's parties are nearly always disastrous. And that is, I think, one of the pleasures of them because you have the fun of going to the party, but you don't have to go. And one of the, I think, great, my friends, Caroline O'Donoghue and Ella Rose Bridget,

both brilliant writers. Caroline does a brilliant podcast, Sentimental Garbage where they talk about commercial women's fiction and they said that the people complain constantly about the tropes in commercial women's fiction all writing has tropes you know sort of thrillers have tropes science fiction has tropes it's not but people are sort of keen to spot them on these and what people think of the things like you know who the heroine is going to fall in love with and you know but that's not we know we know who by page 20 it's the how that we're interested in but also it's the you know the way people kind

of eat and drink and those parties and there's a bit in um uh prudence i think where there's a terribly glorious the gorgeous scatty mother has an impromptu party and everyone's having a terrible brandy cocktail and the taxman's turned up and doesn't know what to do with him and everyone's sort of really enjoying this pate and there are lots of descriptions about, you know, goatee men shoveling food into their mouths. And I think they realise quite late on that it's like it's chappy or chum, you know, they've served dog food up

and everybody is just too pissed to notice and I think that we read Gilly because because of who we hope to be and who we know we are and she makes both of those things not just okay but things to celebrate don't you just want to go and have supper around at Gilly's I mean isn't that the ultimate I had lunch with her with the rest of the Jilly Cooper I was going to say fan club book club definitely fan club and it was like Christmas day and she was Christmas and I sort of loved her more as a human than a writer and I can't tell you how much I love her as a writer she was the same to Ian radiant and I don't use that word lightly Ian does that tally with your experience?

It rather does. Yes. I mean, it was, I have fortunately had lunch with her a couple of times and it's always a joy. She is just the most generous human being, witty, intelligent, kind, thoughtful, drunk. It's Dr. Ian Patterson with Let's Face It, a bit of a crush now. Well, it's true. So think on, Nicky.

When I say drunk, darling, I don't mean drunk. I mean full of wine. Is there a difference? Yes, my darling, because I've given up vodka in a pathetic attempt to be slightly more sober. That's exactly what I meant. I do think Gilly has that in common with F Scott Fitzgerald. Well, when characters are sort of working on their drinking and not wanting to be massive pissheads, they give up drink, but that doesn't include wine or beer. I would like listeners to make a list of all the writers

that we've compared Gilly Cooper to in this podcast. Don't forget Bach. Bach, Shakespeare, Fitzgerald, Lawrence, Dickens. And remember what Tracy said about Fitzgerald. She's quite good. Has she written anything else? It seems a shame, being such a jolly super time, that we're having to bring it to a close,

but I must. Lashings of thanks to Daisy and Ian, to our lovely producer, and to our marvellously well-upholstered sponsor, Unbound. Ah, champagne. You can download all 83 of our other shows, plus follow links, clips and suggestions for further reading on our website, backlisted.fm,

and of course you can still contact us on Twitter, Facebook and Boundless. If you've had as much fun as we all have, why not spill out, indeed spilling out is a thing that happens in these books a lot. Why not spill out a star-spangled review on iTunes or Spotify or whatever else you cozy up to for oral content.

Thank you to Ian Patterson, thank you. It was lovely to be here. I've enjoyed it very much. Daisy Buchanan, thank you very much. It made me joyous and utter. Yes, thanks awfully, everybody. We've had the most marvellous evening.

See you in a fortnight. Well done. Oh, that was just great. That was fun. That was great. All right? Yeah. Great.

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