Life & Wisdom Quote by Jilly Cooper

Domestic desire is doing a careful little waltz with liberal restraint here. Jilly Cooper lets the longing into the room ("I would really like to be a grandmother") and then immediately puts it on a leash ("but only when..."). That pivot is the whole engine of the line: it acknowledges the culturally familiar pressure-point of family expectation while performing the modern virtue of not applying pressure. She wants the milestone, but she wants to be seen wanting it correctly.

The specificity of "Felix or Emily" matters. Named children make the yearning concrete, intimate, and almost disarmingly ordinary; you can hear the family kitchen in it. At the same time, the names also function as a disclaimer: this isn't a generic pro-natal sermon, it's one mother talking about two particular lives. The phrase "the right person" slides in a romantic ideal that Cooper's own fiction has long traded on, but she updates it with consent language: readiness sits with the children, not the parent.

Subtextually, the sentence is an ethical self-portrait. Cooper anticipates the reader's suspicion of meddling and answers it before it's asked. The "really like" is strategically modest - not "need", not "deserve" - softening entitlement. The condition "when... are ready" signals a generational recalibration: in an era of delayed marriage, precarious housing, and changing ideas of partnership, even the wish for grandchildren has to come packaged as support, not demand.

It's a small line that performs emotional diplomacy: longing without leverage.