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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 five-decade writing career. Beloved by every sensible person over a particular 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 view the Rutshire chronicles in sequence: starting with Riders, originally published in the mid-80s, in which Rupert Campbell-Black, rogue, philanderer, horse rider, is initially presented. But that’s a sidebar – what was striking about viewing Rivals as a binge-watch was how effectively Cooper’s fictional realm had remained relevant. The chronicles encapsulated the 1980s: the power dressing and bubble skirts; the preoccupation with social class; aristocrats disdaining the flashy new money, both ignoring everyone else while they snipped about how lukewarm their bubbly was; the sexual politics, with harassment and abuse so routine they were virtually figures in their own right, a pair you could rely on to advance the story.

While Cooper might have occupied this age fully, she was never the classic fish not seeing the ocean because it’s all around. She had a empathy and an perceptive wisdom that you could easily miss from listening to her speak. All her creations, from the pet to the horse to her mother and father to her international student's relative, was always “utterly charming” – unless, that is, they were “truly heavenly”. People got groped and more in Cooper’s work, but that was never OK – it’s surprising how OK it is in many far more literary books of the period.

Social Strata and Personality

She was well-to-do, which for practical purposes meant that her parent had to work for a living, but she’d have described the classes more by their values. The bourgeoisie worried about every little detail, all the time – what others might think, primarily – and the aristocracy didn’t care a … well “such things”. She was raunchy, at times very much, but her prose was never coarse.

She’d describe her family life in fairytale terms: “Daddy went to Dunkirk and Mummy was extremely anxious”. They were both absolutely stunning, engaged in a lifelong love match, and this Cooper replicated in her own union, to a publisher of historical accounts, Leo Cooper. She was twenty-four, he was 27, the relationship wasn’t smooth sailing (he was a bit of a shagger), but she was always comfortable giving people the recipe for a successful union, which is creaking bed springs but (crucial point), they’re noisy with all the joy. He never read her books – he tried Prudence once, when he had influenza, and said it made him feel more ill. She didn’t mind, and said it was returned: she wouldn’t be caught reading war chronicles.

Forever keep a journal – it’s very difficult, when you’re 25, to remember what twenty-four felt like

Early Works

Prudence (1978) was the fifth installment in the Romance series, which commenced with Emily in 1975. If you approached Cooper backwards, having begun in the main series, the Romances, AKA “those ones named after affluent ladies” – also Imogen and Harriet – were almost there, every male lead feeling like a prototype for Campbell-Black, every main character a little bit weak. Plus, page for page (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 loose, men saying outrageous statements about why they liked virgins (similarly, apparently, as a true gentleman always wants to be the primary to open a tin of coffee). I don’t know if I’d advise reading these books at a impressionable age. I thought for a while that that is what the upper class genuinely felt.

They were, however, remarkably precisely constructed, effective romances, which is considerably tougher than it seems. You lived Harriet’s unplanned pregnancy, Bella’s difficult family-by-marriage, Emily’s Scottish isolation – Cooper could take you from an desperate moment to a windfall of the soul, and you could never, even in the initial stages, put your finger on how she managed it. One minute you’d be chuckling at her incredibly close depictions of the bedding, the next you’d have tears in your eyes and little understanding how they arrived.

Authorial Advice

Asked how to be a novelist, Cooper used to say the sort of advice that the literary giant would have said, if he could have been bothered to help out a aspiring writer: utilize all 5 of your perceptions, say how things scented and appeared and heard and felt and tasted – it greatly improves the writing. But perhaps more practical was: “Constantly keep a journal – it’s very difficult, when you’re twenty-five, to recall what being 24 felt like.” That’s one of the initial observations you observe, in the more detailed, densely peopled books, which have numerous female leads rather than just one, all with extremely posh names, unless they’re Stateside, in which case they’re called a common name. Even an generational gap of four years, between two siblings, between a man and a lady, you can detect in the dialogue.

The Lost Manuscript

The backstory of Riders was so pitch-perfectly characteristically Cooper it couldn't possibly have been real, except it definitely is real because a London paper published a notice about it at the time: she finished the whole manuscript in 1970, long before the Romances, brought it into the West End and misplaced it on a vehicle. Some texture has been intentionally omitted of this tale – what, for instance, was so crucial in the urban area that you would leave the sole version of your manuscript on a public transport, which is not that unlike forgetting your baby on a train? Certainly an rendezvous, but which type?

Cooper was prone to embellish her own chaos and ineptitude