The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous

"This would be my second choice after Lace . If you want an easy read, go for this one—although it’s massive (also a word that she uses about Lysander, the main character). I love this story, and I love it to this day. I love the principal idea of it. I love everything about it, and I think they should redo it over and over again. As I said, what I like about Jilly Cooper’s books is that, as a working-class person from the wrong side of the tracks, you get taught to be able to connect with the upper classes. It’s not right, but it’s us and them. It’s like My Fair Lady. We’re Eliza Doolittle and unless we get taken over by Professor Higgins, we have nothing to do with them, and vice versa. Whereas Jilly Cooper books bring us together, because we really like the women. They’re troubled, and they’ve got problems like us. Just because they’ve got money and they have upper-crust accents doesn’t mean their lives are perfect. They’re not. This book is set in the countryside (it’s part of the Rutshire Chronicles ). It’s about this foppish, fit, gorgeous, rich-boy loser, of which I’ve met loads, and I’m sure you have too. Life is a charm for him, but he doesn’t do anything. He’s a playboy. So he ends up being cut off by his family because they think he’s not a good representative for them. He’s sent away from central London—where he’s been gallivanting and enjoying the naughty posh boy Annabel’s lifestyle—and they banish him to their country retreat. That’s the punishment. So he ends up in this sleepy village thinking, ‘What am I going to do here? It’s so boring.’ And then his best friend, Ferdi, comes down and says, ‘This place is a gold mine. Look around, all the women here, their husbands are cheating on them. Why don’t you teach them tennis but do deals with them? You can help them get their husbands interested in them again and make a lot of money.’ So that’s what Lysander ends up doing. It’s like a double bubble, because the women reinvent themselves. Marigold, for example, has become frumpy, she’s not really looking after herself anymore, but as she starts to train with Lysander… Obviously, he does shag them all because it’s a bonkbuster, but as soon as they start having rumpy pumpy with him, they start bringing themselves back to who they were originally. It makes all the husbands jealous and brings them back into line. It’s just great fun. It does exactly what it says on the tin."