Jilly Cooper’s literary agent and Rivals executive producer Felicity Blunt has said that a posthumous publication by the author could soon be making its way to shelves.
Speaking to The Independent as the second season of the bonkbuster hits screens, Blunt said she’d been doing “detective work” to “piece together” Dame Cooper’s final draft.
“That would be my ambition for her because to have another piece of her work would be a really beautiful thing and a wonderful surprise,” Blunt said of the newly uncovered tale.
The Rutshire Chronicles author died aged 88 in October last year, mid-way through shooting the second season of Rivals, starring David Tennant, Aidan Turner and Danny Dyer.
“She would always urge you not to work too hard. And ironically, she worked harder than anybody,” Blunt recalled of Cooper’s dedication to the project in her final months.
“Up until the day she died, she was working, she would work really late into the night, she’d review scripts, she was writing a short story… but she was very much the centre of a party, and only because she wanted to be entertaining everybody around her,” the producer added.
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.
Following Cooper’s death, showrunner Dominic Treadwell-Collins and fellow Rivals producer Alex Lamb said: “We are broken-hearted. Jilly was and always will be one of the world’s greatest storytellers, and it has been the most incredible honour to have been able to work with her to adapt her incredible novels for television.
“Crawling around on her sitting room floor with storylines on pieces of paper, sitting up late at her kitchen table holding hands with love and our tummies with laughter, receiving scoldings and heaps of wisdom in equal measure, watching her eyes sparkling as she sat behind the monitor on set watching Rutshire brought to life – every moment spent with Jilly Cooper was bloody marvellous.”
The second season of Rivals, which depicts the sordid ongoings in a power struggle between two television companies in the Cotswolds, has been praised by critics as “well-written, well-acted and enormously fun”.
In his four star review, The Independent’s Nick Hilton observed: “There is a sense, across the cast, that everyone is enjoying themselves immensely, whether they’re romping on a pony or romping on a staircase.”
