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Jilly Cooper, who left us unexpectedly at the age of 88, racked up sales of 11m copies of her many grand books over her five-decade writing career. Cherished by all discerning readers over a particular age (45), she was presented to a modern audience last year with the Disney+ adaptation of Rivals.

Cooper's Fictional Universe

Devoted fans would have liked to see the Rutshire chronicles in chronological order: starting with Riders, first published in 1985, in which the infamous Rupert Campbell-Black, scoundrel, charmer, rider, is debuts. But that’s a sidebar – what was striking about viewing Rivals as a box set was how effectively Cooper’s fictional realm had remained relevant. The chronicles captured the 1980s: the shoulder pads and puffball skirts; the obsession with class; aristocrats disdaining the ostentatious newly wealthy, both dismissing everyone else while they snipped about how warm their sparkling wine was; the intimate power struggles, with harassment and misconduct so everyday they were practically personas in their own right, a duo you could trust to drive the narrative forward.

While Cooper might have lived in this age completely, she was never the classic fish not seeing the ocean because it’s all around. She had a empathy and an perceptive wisdom that you could easily miss from her public persona. All her creations, from the canine to the horse to her mother and father to her foreign exchange sibling, was always “utterly charming” – unless, that is, they were “absolutely divine”. People got groped and worse in Cooper’s work, but that was never condoned – it’s astonishing how OK it is in many more highbrow books of the period.

Social Strata and Personality

She was affluent middle-class, which for real-world terms meant that her dad had to earn an income, but she’d have characterized the strata more by their customs. The middle-class people worried about all things, all the time – what others might think, primarily – and the elite didn’t bother with “nonsense”. She was spicy, at times extremely, but her prose was never vulgar.

She’d recount her family life in idyllic language: “Daddy went to battle and Mother was extremely anxious”. They were both utterly beautiful, engaged in a enduring romance, and this Cooper replicated in her own partnership, to a publisher of military histories, Leo Cooper. She was twenty-four, he was 27, the relationship wasn’t smooth sailing (he was a bit of a shagger), but she was never less than at ease giving people the secret for a successful union, which is squeaky bed but (big reveal), they’re noisy with all the mirth. He didn't read her books – he picked up Prudence once, when he had influenza, and said it made him feel unwell. She wasn't bothered, and said it was reciprocated: she wouldn’t be seen dead reading war chronicles.

Forever keep a notebook – it’s very challenging, when you’re mid-twenties, to remember what twenty-four felt like

Initial Novels

Prudence (1978) was the fifth book in the Romance collection, which began with Emily in the mid-70s. If you approached Cooper in reverse, having begun in Rutshire, the Romances, AKA “the novels named after posh girls” – also Bella and Harriet – were almost there, every male lead feeling like a prototype for Campbell-Black, every main character a little bit drippy. Plus, chapter for chapter (I can't verify statistically), there was less sex in them. They were a bit reserved on matters of propriety, women always being anxious that men would think they’re loose, men saying ridiculous comments about why they liked virgins (in much the same way, apparently, as a genuine guy always wants to be the primary to break a jar of instant coffee). I don’t know if I’d recommend reading these stories at a formative age. I assumed for a while that that was what affluent individuals actually believed.

They were, however, remarkably well-crafted, high-functioning romances, which is considerably tougher than it seems. You lived Harriet’s unplanned pregnancy, Bella’s difficult family-by-marriage, Emily’s remote Scottish life – Cooper could guide you from an all-is-lost moment to a lottery win of the soul, and you could not ever, even in the initial stages, pinpoint how she achieved it. At one moment you’d be laughing at her highly specific accounts of the bedding, the subsequently you’d have watery eyes and no idea how they arrived.

Writing Wisdom

Inquired how to be a writer, Cooper used to say the type of guidance that Ernest Hemingway would have said, if he could have been bothered to help out a aspiring writer: utilize all 5 of your perceptions, say how things scented and looked and audible and tactile and palatable – it significantly enhances the narrative. But probably more useful was: “Always keep a diary – it’s very difficult, when you’re mid-twenties, to remember what being 24 felt like.” That’s one of the primary realizations you detect, in the more detailed, densely peopled books, which have numerous female leads rather than just one lead, all with very upper-class names, unless they’re Stateside, in which case they’re called a common name. Even an generational gap of a few years, between two sisters, between a gentleman and a woman, you can detect in the dialogue.

An Author's Tale

The historical account of Riders was so exactly characteristically Cooper it can’t possibly have been real, except it absolutely is true because a major newspaper made a public request about it at the period: she completed the whole manuscript in 1970, well before the first books, brought it into the downtown and forgot it on a vehicle. Some texture has been intentionally omitted of this anecdote – what, for example, was so significant in the West End that you would leave the unique draft of your manuscript on a train, which is not that unlike leaving your baby on a train? Surely an meeting, but what kind?

Cooper was wont to embellish her own disorder and clumsiness