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The celebrated author Jilly Cooper, who passed away unexpectedly at the 88 years of age, sold eleven million books of her various epic books over her 50-year career in writing. Cherished by anyone with any sense over a particular age (forty-five), she was introduced to a new generation last year with the Disney+ adaptation of Rivals.

The Rutshire Chronicles

Longtime readers would have preferred to see the Rutshire chronicles in chronological order: starting with Riders, originally published in 1985, in which the infamous Rupert Campbell-Black, cad, philanderer, horse rider, is first introduced. But that’s a side note – what was striking about viewing Rivals as a box set was how well Cooper’s fictional realm had aged. The chronicles captured the 80s: the shoulder pads and bubble skirts; the fixation on status; nobility sneering at the ostentatious newly wealthy, both ignoring everyone else while they quibbled about how room-temperature their champagne was; the sexual politics, with unwanted advances and assault so everyday they were practically figures in their own right, a pair you could count on to advance the story.

While Cooper might have lived in this period totally, she was never the typical fish not seeing the ocean because it’s all around. She had a empathy and an observational intelligence that you maybe wouldn’t guess from listening to her speak. Everyone, from the dog to the horse to her parents to her foreign exchange sibling, was always “utterly charming” – unless, that is, they were “truly heavenly”. People got groped and further in Cooper’s work, but that was never OK – it’s remarkable how OK it is in many far more literary books of the era.

Social Strata and Personality

She was upper-middle-class, which for practical purposes meant that her dad had to work for a living, but she’d have defined the classes more by their customs. The middle classes anxiously contemplated about everything, all the time – what society might think, primarily – and the elite didn’t bother with “nonsense”. She was risqué, at times extremely, but her dialogue was never vulgar.

She’d describe her family life in storybook prose: “Dad went to the war and Mom was extremely anxious”. They were both completely gorgeous, participating in a enduring romance, and this Cooper emulated in her own union, to a businessman of war books, Leo Cooper. She was 24, he was 27, the relationship wasn’t perfect (he was a bit of a shagger), but she was always comfortable giving people the secret for a successful union, which is creaking bed springs but (crucial point), 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 spotted reading war chronicles.

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

Early Works

Prudence (1978) was the fifth installment in the Romance novels, which started with Emily in 1975. If you discovered Cooper in reverse, having begun in Rutshire, the Romances, AKA “the books named after upper-class women” – also Bella and Harriet – were almost there, every hero feeling like a test-run for Campbell-Black, every main character a little bit weak. Plus, chapter for chapter (I can't verify statistically), there wasn’t as much sex in them. They were a bit conservative on issues of propriety, women always fretting that men would think they’re immoral, men saying ridiculous comments about why they preferred virgins (comparably, apparently, as a real man always wants to be the initial to break a jar of instant coffee). I don’t know if I’d recommend reading these stories at a formative age. I believed for a while that that was what the upper class really thought.

They were, however, incredibly tightly written, successful romances, which is much harder than it appears. You lived Harriet’s surprise baby, Bella’s annoying in-laws, Emily’s loneliness in Scotland – Cooper could transport you from an all-is-lost moment to a jackpot of the soul, and you could not ever, even in the early days, pinpoint how she did it. One minute you’d be laughing at her meticulously detailed accounts of the sheets, the subsequently you’d have emotional response and no idea how they appeared.

Writing Wisdom

Questioned how to be a novelist, Cooper used to say the kind of thing that the literary giant would have said, if he could have been arsed to guide a beginner: use all five of your senses, say how things scented and seemed and sounded and tactile and palatable – it greatly improves the prose. But probably more useful was: “Constantly keep a diary – it’s very hard, when you’re mid-twenties, to recall what twenty-four felt like.” That’s one of the initial observations you detect, in the more detailed, densely peopled books, which have 17 heroines rather than just one, all with extremely posh names, unless they’re from the US, in which case they’re called a simple moniker. Even an years apart of several years, between two relatives, between a man and a woman, you can detect in the speech.

An Author's Tale

The historical account of Riders was so exactly Jilly Cooper it can’t possibly have been real, except it certainly was true because London’s Evening Standard ran an appeal about it at the era: she finished the entire draft in 1970, prior to the Romances, took it into the downtown and forgot it on a bus. Some detail has been intentionally omitted of this tale – what, for example, was so important in the urban area that you would abandon the unique draft of your novel on a bus, which is not that unlike forgetting your infant on a railway? Surely an assignation, but what kind?

Cooper was inclined to amp up her own messiness and ineptitude