The daughter of Rivals author Dame Jilly Cooper has shared that her mother sent roughly 100 Valentine’s Day cards each year.
Emily Tarrant, 55, said the celebrated romance writer would send her well wishes to an array of characters from throughout her life on 14 February and Christmas, many of whom sent condolence cards to Cooper’s family after she died last October, aged 88, following a fall.
“She kept Royal Mail in business,” Tarrant told The Times, adding that letters had been sent by everyone from Cooper’s old school friends to a policemen who responded to the 1999 Ladbroke Grove rail crash, which the author had been caught up in and escaped from via a train window.
“They’d carried on this correspondence for years,” Tarrant said of the wide range of acquaintances who’d been delighted by Cooper’s letters.
The Rutshire Chronicles author notoriously favoured the handwritten word and refused to work on a laptop “for fear of a power cut”, instead writing all of her 18 books on a typewriter.
“She was so clever, so well read, you’d go into her bathroom and it was all Byron and Keats,” Tarrant said.
“She loved to study people; she was forever the journalist. She always had a notebook writing everything down, always quizzing my children about new words. She loved ‘bae’ — before anyone else — all the slang words.”
Cooper, best known for her steamy fiction focusing on scandal and adultery in upper-class society, died from a fatal head injury sustained during a fall at her Gloucestershire home.
The beloved writer left behind a fortune befitting her legacy as one of the UK’s most celebrated authors, and left her family with an £8.5m fortune.
Emily, her brother Felix, and Cooper’s stepdaughter Laura will all receive an equal share of the fortune.
Cooper’s funeral was attended by figures including Queen Camilla, Sir Derek Jacobi, Dame Joanna Lumley and Rupert Everett.
“She made people [feel] very special,” Tarrant reflected, adding she’d never get over her mother’s death.
“There’s no getting better. You’re changed as a person. I’ll never be quite the same as I was before.”
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