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The beloved novelist Jilly Cooper, who died suddenly at the 88 years old, achieved sales of eleven million volumes of her assorted epic books over her five-decade literary career. Adored by anyone with any sense over a specific age (mid-forties), she was presented to a modern audience last year with the Disney+ adaptation of Rivals.

Cooper's Fictional Universe

Longtime readers would have preferred to see the Rutshire chronicles in order: beginning with Riders, originally published in the mid-80s, in which the character Rupert Campbell-Black, rogue, philanderer, equestrian, is debuts. But that’s a minor point – what was striking about watching Rivals as a box set was how brilliantly Cooper’s universe had remained relevant. The chronicles distilled the eighties: the broad shoulders and bubble skirts; the obsession with class; aristocrats looking down on the Technicolored nouveau riche, both dismissing everyone else while they snipped about how warm their sparkling wine was; the sexual politics, with inappropriate behavior and misconduct so everyday they were practically characters in their own right, a double act you could trust to move the plot along.

While Cooper might have lived in this age totally, she was never the typical fish not seeing the ocean because it’s ubiquitous. She had a empathy and an perceptive wisdom that you could easily miss from her public persona. Every character, from the pet to the horse to her family to her international student's relative, was always “absolutely sweet” – unless, that is, they were “completely exquisite”. People got assaulted and further in Cooper’s work, but that was never OK – it’s astonishing how tolerated it is in many supposedly sophisticated books of the time.

Class and Character

She was affluent middle-class, which for real-world terms meant that her parent had to work for a living, but she’d have defined the strata more by their mores. The middle-class people anxiously contemplated about every little detail, all the time – what other people might think, mainly – and the aristocracy didn’t bother with “such things”. She was raunchy, at times incredibly so, but her dialogue was never coarse.

She’d describe her childhood in storybook prose: “Daddy went to Dunkirk and Mother was extremely anxious”. They were both absolutely stunning, engaged in a eternal partnership, and this Cooper mirrored in her own partnership, to a editor of military histories, Leo Cooper. She was 24, he was twenty-seven, the relationship wasn’t perfect (he was a bit of a shagger), but she was never less than comfortable giving people the secret for a blissful partnership, which is creaking bed springs but (crucial point), they’re noisy with all the mirth. He never read her books – he tried Prudence once, when he had influenza, and said it made him feel worse. She took no offense, and said it was returned: she wouldn’t be caught reading war chronicles.

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

Early Works

Prudence (1978) was the fifth volume in the Romance series, which started with Emily in 1975. If you approached Cooper from the later works, having commenced in the main series, the early novels, alternatively called “those ones named after posh girls” – also Imogen and Harriet – were close but no cigar, every male lead feeling like a trial version for Rupert, every heroine a little bit weak. Plus, page for page (I haven’t actually run the numbers), there wasn’t as much sex in them. They were a bit uptight on issues of modesty, women always being anxious that men would think they’re immoral, men saying ridiculous comments about why they liked virgins (comparably, ostensibly, as a genuine guy always wants to be the first to open a jar of instant coffee). I don’t know if I’d advise reading these books at a young age. I thought for a while that that is what posh people genuinely felt.

They were, however, remarkably precisely constructed, effective romances, which is much harder than it seems. You felt Harriet’s unwanted pregnancy, Bella’s annoying relatives, Emily’s loneliness in Scotland – Cooper could take you from an hopeless moment to a lottery win of the emotions, and you could not ever, even in the early days, pinpoint how she did it. One minute you’d be chuckling at her highly specific descriptions of the bed linen, the next you’d have emotional response and no idea how they appeared.

Authorial Advice

Inquired how to be a novelist, Cooper would often state the type of guidance that the literary giant would have said, if he could have been bothered to help out a beginner: utilize all all of your senses, say how things scented and looked and heard and touched and flavored – it greatly improves the narrative. But perhaps more practical was: “Always keep a journal – it’s very challenging, when you’re twenty-five, to remember what age 24 felt like.” That’s one of the first things you detect, in the longer, character-rich books, which have 17 heroines rather than just one lead, all with extremely posh names, unless they’re Stateside, in which case they’re called Helen. Even an age difference of a few years, between two relatives, between a man and a woman, you can hear in the speech.

A Literary Mystery

The backstory of Riders was so pitch-perfectly Jilly Cooper it can’t possibly have been real, except it absolutely is real because a major newspaper published a notice about it at the time: she finished the complete book in 1970, well before the Romances, took it into the downtown and misplaced it on a public transport. Some context has been purposely excluded of this story – what, for example, was so significant in the West End that you would abandon the sole version of your manuscript on a bus, which is not that unlike forgetting your child on a train? Undoubtedly an assignation, but what kind?

Cooper was inclined to embellish her own chaos and ineptitude