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The celebrated author Jilly Cooper, who passed away unexpectedly at the age of 88, racked up sales of 11 million books of her various epic books over her half-century literary career. Beloved by anyone with any sense over a certain age (forty-five), she was presented to a younger audience last year with the TV adaptation of Rivals.

The Rutshire Chronicles

Cooper purists would have wanted to see the Rutshire chronicles in order: beginning with Riders, initially released in 1985, in which the infamous Rupert Campbell-Black, rogue, charmer, horse rider, is initially presented. But that’s a side note – what was remarkable about viewing Rivals as a complete series was how well Cooper’s world had aged. The chronicles encapsulated the eighties: the broad shoulders and bubble skirts; the obsession with class; aristocrats sneering at the ostentatious newly wealthy, both dismissing everyone else while they snipped about how lukewarm their champagne was; the intimate power struggles, with harassment and misconduct so everyday they were practically personas in their own right, a duo you could count on to move the plot along.

While Cooper might have inhabited this age fully, she was never the classic fish not perceiving the ocean because it’s everywhere. She had a humanity and an observational intelligence that you could easily miss from her public persona. Everyone, from the pet to the pony to her family to her foreign exchange sibling, was always “absolutely sweet” – unless, that is, they were “absolutely divine”. People got groped and further in Cooper’s work, but that was never condoned – it’s surprising how tolerated it is in many supposedly sophisticated books of the time.

Class and Character

She was affluent middle-class, which for all intents and purposes meant that her parent had to earn an income, but she’d have described the social classes more by their values. The middle classes anxiously contemplated about everything, all the time – what other people might think, mostly – and the upper classes didn’t care a … well “such things”. She was risqué, at times extremely, but her dialogue was always refined.

She’d describe her childhood in storybook prose: “Father went to Dunkirk and Mummy was deeply concerned”. They were both absolutely stunning, engaged in a eternal partnership, and this Cooper emulated in her own union, to a publisher of war books, Leo Cooper. She was twenty-four, he was twenty-seven, the union wasn’t smooth sailing (he was a bit of a shagger), but she was consistently at ease giving people the secret for a blissful partnership, which is noisy mattress but (crucial point), they’re squeaking 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 more ill. She took no offense, and said it was returned: she wouldn’t be caught reading war chronicles.

Forever keep a notebook – it’s very difficult, when you’re twenty-five, to recall what being 24 felt like

Early Works

Prudence (the late 70s) was the fifth volume in the Romance novels, which commenced with Emily in 1975. If you approached Cooper backwards, having commenced in her later universe, the initial books, AKA “the books named after posh girls” – also Imogen and Harriet – were near misses, every protagonist feeling like a test-run for the iconic character, every female lead a little bit weak. Plus, line for line (I haven’t actually run the numbers), there wasn't the same quantity of sex in them. They were a bit reserved on matters of modesty, women always being anxious that men would think they’re promiscuous, men saying ridiculous comments about why they favored virgins (comparably, ostensibly, as a genuine guy always wants to be the initial to unseal a tin of Nescafé). I don’t know if I’d recommend reading these stories at a impressionable age. I thought for a while that that’s what the upper class really thought.

They were, however, extremely well-crafted, high-functioning romances, which is far more difficult than it appears. You experienced Harriet’s unwanted pregnancy, Bella’s difficult relatives, Emily’s loneliness in Scotland – Cooper could take you from an hopeless moment to a windfall of the heart, and you could never, even in the beginning, pinpoint how she did it. Suddenly you’d be chuckling at her incredibly close accounts of the bedding, the subsequently you’d have emotional response and little understanding how they arrived.

Literary Guidance

Inquired how to be a writer, Cooper would often state the sort of advice that the literary giant would have said, if he could have been bothered to help out a novice: employ all five of your senses, say how things scented and seemed and heard and felt and flavored – it greatly improves the writing. But likely more helpful was: “Constantly keep a diary – it’s very hard, when you’re 25, to remember what twenty-four felt like.” That’s one of the initial observations you detect, in the more extensive, character-rich books, which have seventeen main characters rather than just one lead, all with extremely posh names, unless they’re Stateside, in which case they’re called Helen. Even an years apart of a few years, between two sisters, between a gentleman and a female, you can hear in the speech.

A Literary Mystery

The origin story of Riders was so pitch-perfectly typical of the author it can’t possibly have been true, except it certainly was factual because London’s Evening Standard made a public request about it at the time: she wrote the complete book in 1970, long before the Romances, carried it into the downtown and left it on a bus. Some detail has been intentionally omitted of this story – what, for instance, was so significant in the city that you would forget the sole version of your manuscript on a public transport, which is not that unlike forgetting your baby on a railway? Surely an meeting, but which type?

Cooper was inclined to embellish her own messiness and ineptitude