London - Her racy novels have always had steamy romps and a romance between men and women at their heart.
But now Jilly Cooper has revealed that she ‘wouldn’t mind’ writing her very first lesbian sex scene.
An audience at the Cheltenham Literature Festival heard the 78-year-old author has been ‘thinking a lot’ about writing passionate scenes between women, as ‘there seems to be a lot of it about now’.
She added: ‘That’s lovely, but I haven’t ever done one. Not a lesbian one. But I wouldn’t mind trying.’
Cooper, who is recovering from a hip replacement, appeared fascinated by changing attitudes towards relationships in the modern world, telling the audience about a young man she had met recently who said he ‘looks for a person not a gender’ when at a party.
‘Think about that,’ she said.
But when asked if society is less permissive now than in the 1960s, the author said that today can still feel like ‘the Victorian age’.
She added: ‘Political correctness has really done this, because you can’t even say you don’t like red hair now, can you?
‘Everybody has got to have issues now. As soon as you get a hero they all have to go off and see therapists. In the old days heroes didn’t go to see therapists.’
Cooper’s rise to fame started when she wrote a popular newspaper column about marriage, sex and housework. It led to the publication of her first book How to Stay Married in 1969.
In 1975 she wrote a series of ‘permissive romances’ based on long magazine stories and in 1985 she published her first big novel, Riders, which went straight to number one in the bestseller lists.
The front cover for the book, which follows the fortunes of a promiscuous group of showjumping stars, famously showed a male hand seductively resting on a woman’s tight white jodhpurs.
Fans were outraged when a tamer version was realised earlier this year – with the man’s hand digitally altered to rest on her hip instead. But now the author has revealed that the original racy version will be making a comeback.
She told the festival she was ‘very, very cross’ about the new cover, adding: ‘It was awful. The hand’s going back now for the re-print.’
The decision to tone down the image was taken, she said, because ‘the supermarkets were very shocked by the old cover. And they also said it demeaned women and that it was un-politically correct’.
Daily Mail