Super Cooper

Upperand middle-class English girls spend the vast majority of adolescence reading Jilly Cooper books under the bedclothes (they need to be hidden because of their low-key sex scenes). Cooper herself was once a middle-class girl at boarding school, and her work reinforces everything that these girls have been brought up to believe in—a dislike of "social climbers," a glorious faith in the superiority of their own class, a hope that one day a rich man in a red Ferrari will sweep them off their feet. Many consider Cooper a leading commentator on the British class system—though she rarely touches on the working class—and her fiction writing (which her husband, a publisher, refuses to read) has developed from short romantic novels to seven-hundred-page blockbusters. Her latest, Rivals (Ballantine), about a glamorous battle for an independent TV company, is sure to satisfy discerning Anglophiles and Danielle Steel addicts alike.

DAISY WAUGH