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The celebrated author Jilly Cooper, who passed away unexpectedly at the 88 years of age, achieved sales of 11 million copies of her assorted grand books over her half-century literary career. Beloved by anyone with any sense over a particular age (45), she was introduced to a new generation last year with the Disney+ adaptation of Rivals.

The Beloved Series

Longtime readers would have liked to see the Rutshire chronicles in chronological order: commencing with Riders, initially released in the mid-80s, in which Rupert Campbell-Black, cad, charmer, equestrian, is debuts. But that’s a side note – what was striking about seeing Rivals as a box set was how well Cooper’s world had remained relevant. The chronicles encapsulated the 80s: the broad shoulders and bubble skirts; the fixation on status; the upper class sneering at the Technicolored nouveau riche, both ignoring everyone else while they snipped about how warm their sparkling wine was; the gender dynamics, with inappropriate behavior and abuse so routine they were practically personas in their own right, a pair you could rely on to drive the narrative forward.

While Cooper might have occupied this era fully, she was never the proverbial fish not perceiving the ocean because it’s everywhere. She had a compassion and an keen insight that you maybe wouldn’t guess from listening to her speak. Everyone, from the dog to the equine to her parents to her international student's relative, was always “absolutely sweet” – unless, that is, they were “completely exquisite”. People got groped 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 period.

Background and Behavior

She was upper-middle-class, which for practical purposes meant that her parent had to earn an income, but she’d have characterized the social classes more by their values. The middle classes fretted about everything, all the time – what other people might think, primarily – and the elite didn’t give a … well “nonsense”. She was spicy, at times extremely, but her prose was never coarse.

She’d describe her childhood in idyllic language: “Dad went to the war and Mother was extremely anxious”. They were both completely gorgeous, engaged in a lifelong love match, and this Cooper replicated in her own partnership, to a businessman of historical accounts, Leo Cooper. She was twenty-four, he was 27, the marriage wasn’t without hiccups (he was a unfaithful type), but she was always comfortable giving people the secret for a successful union, which is squeaky bed but (key insight), they’re creaking with all the laughter. He never read her books – he read Prudence once, when he had flu, and said it made him feel unwell. She took no offense, and said it was returned: she wouldn’t be spotted reading war chronicles.

Constantly keep a journal – it’s very hard, when you’re mid-twenties, to recollect what age 24 felt like

The Romance Series

Prudence (1978) was the fifth installment in the Romance collection, which began with Emily in 1975. If you discovered Cooper in reverse, having started in her later universe, the Romances, AKA “the novels named after posh girls” – also Imogen and Harriet – were near misses, every protagonist feeling like a prototype for Campbell-Black, every female lead a little bit insipid. Plus, chapter for chapter (I haven’t actually run the numbers), there wasn't the same quantity of sex in them. They were a bit uptight on topics of decorum, women always being anxious that men would think they’re immoral, men saying ridiculous comments about why they liked virgins (in much the same way, seemingly, as a true gentleman always wants to be the primary to unseal a tin of Nescafé). I don’t know if I’d advise reading these books at a impressionable age. I believed for a while that that was what affluent individuals really thought.

They were, however, remarkably well-crafted, high-functioning romances, which is far more difficult than it appears. You felt Harriet’s unwanted pregnancy, Bella’s difficult relatives, Emily’s loneliness in Scotland – Cooper could transport you from an all-is-lost moment to a windfall of the emotions, and you could not ever, even in the initial stages, pinpoint how she managed it. At one moment you’d be chuckling at her meticulously detailed depictions of the bed linen, the subsequently you’d have tears in your eyes and little understanding how they arrived.

Authorial Advice

Questioned how to be a author, Cooper used to say the kind of thing that the literary giant would have said, if he could have been inclined to guide a novice: utilize all five of your senses, say how things scented and appeared and sounded and felt and flavored – it greatly improves the narrative. But probably more useful was: “Always keep a diary – it’s very difficult, when you’re twenty-five, to recall what being 24 felt like.” That’s one of the first things you detect, in the longer, character-rich books, which have seventeen main characters rather than just one, all with extremely posh names, unless they’re American, in which case they’re called a common name. Even an years apart of several years, between two sisters, between a man and a lady, you can detect in the speech.

A Literary Mystery

The origin story of Riders was so pitch-perfectly Jilly Cooper it couldn't possibly have been accurate, except it certainly was factual because London’s Evening Standard published a notice about it at the time: she wrote the entire draft in 1970, well before the Romances, carried it into the West End and left it on a bus. Some texture has been intentionally omitted of this story – what, for case, was so crucial in the city that you would leave the unique draft of your novel on a bus, which is not that unlike forgetting your infant on a transport? Surely an assignation, but which type?

Cooper was inclined to exaggerate her own messiness and clumsiness