Jilly Cooper, known for her steamy romance series, has died. Cooper was 88 years old.

Her publisher, Curtis Brown, said Cooper’s death was a shock, saying she had died on Oct. 5 after a fall.

“Her unexpected death has come as a complete shock,” her children wrote in the statement released by Brown, The New York Times reported.

Cooper started writing in 1969 as a newspaper columnist after she met the editor of The Sunday Times Colour Magazine at a dinner party. She had told him about how exhausting running a home was.

She said she told Godfrey Smith “how hopeless a wife I was,” and he was taken by her that he asked her to write a column for the magazine. The column was published every week for 13 years.

The writer also published her first book in 1969, “How to Stay Married,” at a time when she had been wed for only seven years, The New York Times reported.

The book was republished in 2011 and she wrote a new foreword, saying that she “nearly died of horror” rereading the book so many years later.

“How could I have insisted that ‘a woman should be grateful her husband wants her,'" and if she denies a physical relationship with her husband, that “she has only herself to blame if he’s unfaithful,” she wrote, adding “Ouch, ouch!”

It was her “Rutshire Chronicles” series that she had her most fame, an 11-book series that was started in 1985.

The novels highlighted the scandals of the British wealthy families that were not only risqué but also critiqued the country’s class system, Sky News reported.

Her last book in the series was published in 2023.

“Her plots were both intricate and gutsy, spiked with sharp observations and wicked humour. She regularly mined her own life for inspiration and there was something Austenesque about her dissections of society, its many prejudices and norms,” her agent, Felicity Blunt, wrote, according to The Times.

The series was made for television in the Disney+ and Hulu show “Rivals.”

Queen Camilla called Cooper a “legend” and a “wonderfully witty and compassionate friend,” Sky News reported.

Cooper was appointed a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2024, The New York Times reported.

She left behind her two children and five grandchildren. Her husband died in 2013 of Parkinson’s.

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