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The celebrated author Jilly Cooper, who died suddenly at the age of 88, racked up sales of eleven million volumes of her assorted epic books over her five-decade career in writing. Beloved by all discerning readers over a specific age (mid-forties), she was introduced to a younger audience last year with the streaming series adaptation of Rivals.

Cooper's Fictional Universe

Longtime readers would have wanted to view the Rutshire chronicles in order: starting with Riders, first published in 1985, in which the character Rupert Campbell-Black, scoundrel, philanderer, rider, is first introduced. But that’s a side note – what was striking about seeing Rivals as a box set was how well Cooper’s universe had aged. The chronicles distilled the 80s: the shoulder pads and voluminous skirts; the obsession with class; aristocrats looking down on the ostentatious newly wealthy, both ignoring everyone else while they complained about how warm their sparkling wine was; the sexual politics, with harassment and abuse so commonplace they were practically characters in their own right, a pair you could count on to drive the narrative forward.

While Cooper might have inhabited this era totally, she was never the proverbial fish not noticing the ocean because it’s everywhere. She had a humanity and an observational intelligence that you maybe wouldn’t guess from listening to her speak. Everyone, from the pet to the horse to her parents to her foreign exchange sibling, was always “utterly charming” – unless, that is, they were “absolutely divine”. People got groped and further in Cooper’s work, but that was never OK – it’s surprising how acceptable it is in many supposedly sophisticated books of the period.

Class and Character

She was affluent middle-class, which for practical purposes meant that her dad had to work for a living, but she’d have characterized the strata more by their mores. The middle classes worried about everything, all the time – what other people might think, primarily – and the upper classes didn’t bother with “such things”. She was risqué, at times extremely, but her language was never vulgar.

She’d describe her family life in idyllic language: “Father went to Dunkirk and Mother was terribly, terribly worried”. They were both completely gorgeous, involved in a eternal partnership, and this Cooper replicated in her own union, to a businessman of military histories, Leo Cooper. She was twenty-four, he was twenty-seven, the union wasn’t smooth sailing (he was a unfaithful type), but she was never less than at ease giving people the secret for a happy marriage, which is noisy mattress but (key insight), they’re squeaking with all the mirth. He didn't read her books – he tried Prudence once, when he had a cold, and said it made him feel worse. She didn’t mind, and said it was mutual: she wouldn’t be seen dead reading battle accounts.

Forever keep a journal – it’s very difficult, when you’re 25, to recollect what age 24 felt like

Initial Novels

Prudence (1978) was the fifth installment in the Romance collection, which started with Emily in 1975. If you discovered Cooper backwards, having commenced in her later universe, the initial books, also known as “those ones named after affluent ladies” – also Octavia and Harriet – were near misses, every hero feeling like a trial version for Campbell-Black, every heroine a little bit weak. 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 conservative on topics of decorum, women always fretting that men would think they’re immoral, men saying batshit things about why they preferred virgins (in much the same way, apparently, as a genuine guy always wants to be the primary to open a jar of coffee). I don’t know if I’d advise reading these books at a impressionable age. I assumed for a while that that was what affluent individuals really thought.

They were, however, extremely tightly written, effective romances, which is considerably tougher than it seems. You felt Harriet’s unplanned pregnancy, Bella’s annoying family-by-marriage, Emily’s remote Scottish life – Cooper could take you from an all-is-lost moment to a windfall of the heart, and you could not once, even in the initial stages, identify how she did it. One minute you’d be chuckling at her incredibly close accounts of the sheets, the subsequently you’d have emotional response and little understanding how they appeared.

Writing Wisdom

Inquired how to be a novelist, Cooper frequently advised the sort of advice that Ernest Hemingway would have said, if he could have been arsed to assist a beginner: employ all 5 of your perceptions, say how things smelled and looked and audible and tactile and flavored – it significantly enhances the prose. But perhaps more practical was: “Forever keep a diary – it’s very hard, when you’re twenty-five, to remember what being 24 felt like.” That’s one of the first things you detect, in the more detailed, character-rich books, which have seventeen main characters rather than just one, all with extremely posh names, unless they’re from the US, in which case they’re called a common name. Even an generational gap of several years, between two relatives, between a man and a woman, you can perceive in the conversation.

An Author's Tale

The backstory of Riders was so pitch-perfectly characteristically Cooper it can’t possibly have been true, except it certainly was real because London’s Evening Standard ran an appeal about it at the time: she wrote the whole manuscript in 1970, well before the early novels, took it into the city center and left it on a public transport. Some texture has been purposely excluded of this anecdote – what, for instance, was so significant in the urban area that you would leave the unique draft of your novel on a train, which is not that far from forgetting your child on a transport? Surely an meeting, but what kind?

Cooper was wont to embellish her own disorder and ineptitude