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The beloved novelist Jilly Cooper, who passed away unexpectedly at the age of 88, sold eleven million copies of her various sweeping books over her half-century career in writing. Beloved by anyone with any sense over a specific age (mid-forties), she was introduced to a new generation last year with the Disney+ adaptation of Rivals.

The Rutshire Chronicles

Cooper purists would have liked to view the Rutshire chronicles in sequence: starting with Riders, originally published in 1985, in which the character Rupert Campbell-Black, scoundrel, philanderer, horse rider, is initially presented. But that’s a minor point – what was striking about seeing Rivals as a box set was how effectively Cooper’s fictional realm had stood the test of time. The chronicles distilled the 1980s: the power dressing and puffball skirts; the obsession with class; nobility looking down on the ostentatious newly wealthy, both overlooking everyone else while they snipped about how lukewarm their bubbly was; the sexual politics, with unwanted advances and abuse so everyday they were virtually personas in their own right, a duo you could trust to drive the narrative forward.

While Cooper might have lived in this age fully, she was never the classic fish not perceiving the ocean because it’s everywhere. She had a compassion and an keen insight that you maybe wouldn’t guess from her public persona. Every character, from the pet to the equine to her family to her foreign exchange sibling, was always “absolutely sweet” – unless, that is, they were “truly heavenly”. People got assaulted and more in Cooper’s work, but that was never acceptable – it’s astonishing how OK it is in many more highbrow books of the time.

Background and Behavior

She was upper-middle-class, which for real-world terms meant that her dad had to earn an income, but she’d have defined the classes more by their customs. The middle classes anxiously contemplated about every little detail, all the time – what society might think, mostly – and the aristocracy didn’t bother with “such things”. She was raunchy, at times incredibly so, but her language was never coarse.

She’d recount her childhood in storybook prose: “Father went to battle and Mom was deeply concerned”. They were both completely gorgeous, participating in a lifelong love match, and this Cooper mirrored in her own union, to a editor of military histories, Leo Cooper. She was 24, he was in his late twenties, the union wasn’t smooth sailing (he was a unfaithful type), but she was never less than comfortable giving people the recipe for a happy marriage, which is noisy mattress but (big reveal), they’re creaking with all the joy. He didn't read her books – he picked up Prudence once, when he had influenza, and said it made him feel more ill. She wasn't bothered, and said it was mutual: she wouldn’t be caught reading military history.

Constantly keep a diary – it’s very difficult, when you’re mid-twenties, to recall what being 24 felt like

Initial Novels

Prudence (the late 70s) was the fifth book in the Romance series, which commenced with Emily in 1975. If you approached Cooper backwards, having started in Rutshire, the initial books, AKA “those ones named after upper-class women” – also Imogen and Harriet – were near misses, every male lead feeling like a prototype for the iconic character, every female lead a little bit weak. Plus, chapter for chapter (I haven’t actually run the numbers), there wasn’t as much sex in them. They were a bit reserved on topics of propriety, women always worrying that men would think they’re loose, men saying outrageous statements about why they liked virgins (in much the same way, seemingly, as a true gentleman always wants to be the first to break a container of Nescafé). I don’t know if I’d suggest reading these books at a formative age. I thought for a while that that was what posh people actually believed.

They were, however, extremely tightly written, high-functioning romances, which is considerably tougher than it seems. You lived Harriet’s surprise baby, Bella’s annoying relatives, Emily’s loneliness in Scotland – Cooper could transport you from an desperate moment to a jackpot of the emotions, and you could not ever, even in the beginning, put your finger on how she managed it. One minute you’d be laughing at her incredibly close accounts of the bed linen, the subsequently you’d have tears in your eyes and uncertainty how they got there.

Authorial Advice

Inquired how to be a author, Cooper would often state the type of guidance that Ernest Hemingway would have said, if he could have been inclined to assist a aspiring writer: utilize all five of your perceptions, say how things aromatic and looked and audible and touched and palatable – it greatly improves the writing. But likely more helpful was: “Forever keep a journal – it’s very hard, when you’re mid-twenties, to recall what being 24 felt like.” That’s one of the initial observations you notice, in the longer, more populated books, which have numerous female leads rather than just a single protagonist, all with decidedly aristocratic names, unless they’re American, in which case they’re called a simple moniker. Even an generational gap of several years, between two siblings, between a gentleman and a lady, you can perceive in the dialogue.

A Literary Mystery

The backstory of Riders was so perfectly typical of the author it couldn't possibly have been real, except it definitely is factual because a major newspaper published a notice about it at the era: she completed the whole manuscript in 1970, well before the Romances, took it into the West End and left it on a public transport. Some texture has been intentionally omitted of this story – what, for example, was so significant in the West End that you would leave the only copy of your novel on a train, which is not that far from abandoning your baby on a train? Undoubtedly an assignation, but what kind?

Cooper was wont to embellish her own messiness and haplessness