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The beloved novelist Jilly Cooper, who passed away unexpectedly at the 88 years old, racked up sales of eleven million books of her many sweeping books over her 50-year literary career. Cherished by all discerning readers over a particular age (forty-five), she was introduced to a modern audience last year with the Disney+ adaptation of Rivals.

The Beloved Series

Cooper purists would have liked to watch the Rutshire chronicles in order: starting with Riders, originally published in 1985, in which Rupert Campbell-Black, scoundrel, heartbreaker, horse rider, is debuts. But that’s a side note – what was remarkable about seeing Rivals as a box set was how brilliantly Cooper’s universe had remained relevant. The chronicles captured the 80s: the shoulder pads and puffball skirts; the preoccupation with social class; the upper class sneering at the Technicolored nouveau riche, both dismissing everyone else while they quibbled about how lukewarm their champagne was; the sexual politics, with unwanted advances and abuse so everyday they were practically figures in their own right, a duo you could trust to move the plot along.

While Cooper might have lived in this age completely, she was never the classic fish not perceiving the ocean because it’s all around. She had a empathy and an keen insight that you could easily miss from hearing her talk. All her creations, from the dog to the horse to her mother and father to her foreign exchange sibling, was always “utterly charming” – unless, that is, they were “completely exquisite”. People got harassed and worse in Cooper’s work, but that was never OK – it’s surprising how tolerated it is in many far more literary books of the period.

Background and Behavior

She was upper-middle-class, which for practical purposes meant that her dad had to hold down a job, but she’d have defined the strata more by their customs. The middle classes anxiously contemplated about all things, all the time – what other people might think, primarily – and the elite didn’t bother with “such things”. She was raunchy, at times incredibly so, but her prose was never coarse.

She’d describe her childhood in idyllic language: “Daddy went to the war and Mother was terribly, terribly worried”. They were both absolutely stunning, involved in a eternal partnership, and this Cooper mirrored in her own union, to a businessman of historical accounts, Leo Cooper. She was twenty-four, he was twenty-seven, the relationship wasn’t without hiccups (he was a unfaithful type), but she was never less than at ease giving people the formula for a successful union, which is noisy mattress but (crucial point), they’re noisy with all the laughter. He didn't read her books – he picked up Prudence once, when he had influenza, and said it made him feel worse. She took no offense, and said it was reciprocated: she wouldn’t be spotted reading war chronicles.

Constantly keep a notebook – it’s very challenging, when you’re 25, to recall what twenty-four felt like

The Romance Series

Prudence (1978) was the fifth book in the Romance series, which started with Emily in 1975. If you discovered Cooper in reverse, having begun in the main series, the Romances, also known as “the books named after affluent ladies” – also Octavia and Harriet – were near misses, every hero feeling like a test-run for the iconic character, every heroine a little bit weak. Plus, line for line (I haven’t actually run the numbers), there was less sex in them. They were a bit reserved on issues of decorum, women always worrying that men would think they’re loose, men saying outrageous statements about why they preferred virgins (similarly, seemingly, as a real man always wants to be the first to unseal a container of coffee). I don’t know if I’d advise reading these novels at a impressionable age. I believed for a while that that was what posh people really thought.

They were, however, remarkably tightly written, high-functioning romances, which is considerably tougher than it seems. You lived Harriet’s unplanned pregnancy, Bella’s pissy family-by-marriage, Emily’s Scottish isolation – Cooper could take you from an desperate moment to a lottery win of the heart, and you could never, even in the initial stages, identify how she achieved it. Suddenly you’d be chuckling at her highly specific descriptions of the sheets, the next you’d have tears in your eyes and little understanding how they appeared.

Writing Wisdom

Inquired how to be a author, Cooper used to say the sort of advice that the literary giant would have said, if he could have been bothered to help out a novice: use all five of your faculties, say how things scented and appeared and audible and felt and flavored – it greatly improves the narrative. But probably more useful was: “Forever keep a journal – it’s very hard, when you’re 25, to remember what twenty-four felt like.” That’s one of the first things you detect, in the more extensive, character-rich books, which have seventeen main characters rather than just one, all with very upper-class names, unless they’re Stateside, in which case they’re called Helen. Even an generational gap of four years, between two sisters, between a male and a woman, you can detect in the dialogue.

A Literary Mystery

The origin story of Riders was so pitch-perfectly typical of the author it can’t possibly have been real, except it certainly was factual because a major newspaper published a notice about it at the period: she completed the entire draft in 1970, long before the first books, brought it into the city center and forgot it on a public transport. Some texture has been deliberately left out of this anecdote – what, for instance, was so significant in the city that you would leave the only copy of your book on a public transport, which is not that unlike forgetting your baby on a transport? Surely an rendezvous, but which type?

Cooper was prone to embellish her own disorder and haplessness