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The celebrated author Jilly Cooper, who left us unexpectedly at the 88 years old, racked up sales of 11 million volumes of her many epic books over her five-decade literary career. Cherished by all discerning readers over a particular 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 liked to watch the Rutshire chronicles in chronological order: starting with Riders, first published in 1985, in which the infamous Rupert Campbell-Black, cad, philanderer, equestrian, is first introduced. But that’s a sidebar – what was remarkable about watching Rivals as a complete series was how brilliantly Cooper’s universe had remained relevant. The chronicles distilled the 80s: the power dressing and puffball skirts; the preoccupation with social class; the upper class disdaining the flashy new money, both dismissing everyone else while they snipped about how lukewarm their sparkling wine was; the intimate power struggles, with inappropriate behavior and abuse so commonplace they were almost personas in their own right, a pair you could rely on to drive the narrative forward.

While Cooper might have lived in this age fully, she was never the proverbial fish not noticing the ocean because it’s ubiquitous. She had a empathy and an observational intelligence that you could easily miss from hearing her talk. Every character, from the dog to the pony to her mother and father to her French exchange’s brother, was always “completely delightful” – unless, that is, they were “completely exquisite”. People got harassed and worse in Cooper’s work, but that was never acceptable – it’s astonishing how acceptable it is in many supposedly sophisticated books of the era.

Class and Character

She was well-to-do, which for real-world terms meant that her dad had to work for a living, but she’d have described the social classes more by their values. The bourgeoisie anxiously contemplated about everything, all the time – what society might think, primarily – and the elite didn’t care a … well “nonsense”. She was risqué, at times incredibly so, but her dialogue was always refined.

She’d narrate her upbringing in idyllic language: “Daddy went to the war and Mom was terribly, terribly worried”. They were both absolutely stunning, participating in a eternal partnership, and this Cooper emulated in her own union, to a businessman of historical accounts, Leo Cooper. She was in her mid-twenties, he was 27, the union wasn’t perfect (he was a bit of a shagger), but she was consistently at ease giving people the recipe for a successful union, which is noisy mattress but (big reveal), they’re noisy with all the joy. He avoided reading her books – he read Prudence once, when he had influenza, and said it made him feel more ill. She didn’t mind, and said it was mutual: she wouldn’t be caught reading battle accounts.

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

Initial Novels

Prudence (1978) was the fifth volume in the Romance novels, which commenced with Emily in 1975. If you came to Cooper from the later works, having started in Rutshire, the early novels, alternatively called “the books named after upper-class women” – also Imogen and Harriet – were almost there, every protagonist feeling like a test-run for the iconic character, every heroine a little bit drippy. Plus, line for line (I can't verify statistically), there wasn’t as much sex in them. They were a bit reserved on matters of modesty, women always fretting that men would think they’re loose, men saying batshit things about why they preferred virgins (in much the same way, seemingly, as a genuine guy always wants to be the primary to unseal a tin of instant coffee). I don’t know if I’d suggest reading these novels at a impressionable age. I thought for a while that that’s what affluent individuals genuinely felt.

They were, however, extremely well-crafted, successful romances, which is far more difficult than it sounds. You experienced Harriet’s surprise baby, Bella’s difficult relatives, Emily’s Scottish isolation – Cooper could take you from an all-is-lost moment to a lottery win of the soul, and you could not ever, even in the early days, identify how she did it. At one moment you’d be smiling at her meticulously detailed depictions of the bedding, the following moment you’d have emotional response and little understanding how they got there.

Authorial Advice

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 assist a novice: employ all five of your perceptions, say how things scented and looked and heard and touched and palatable – it greatly improves the writing. But perhaps more practical was: “Always keep a notebook – it’s very difficult, when you’re mid-twenties, to remember what being 24 felt like.” That’s one of the primary realizations you notice, in the more extensive, more populated books, which have 17 heroines rather than just a single protagonist, all with very upper-class names, unless they’re from the US, in which case they’re called a simple moniker. Even an age difference of a few years, between two siblings, between a gentleman and a woman, you can detect in the dialogue.

A Literary Mystery

The backstory of Riders was so perfectly typical of the author it can’t possibly have been accurate, except it definitely is real because a London paper published a notice about it at the time: she finished the entire draft in 1970, prior to the first books, carried it into the downtown and misplaced it on a vehicle. Some texture has been purposely excluded of this anecdote – what, for instance, was so crucial in the city that you would abandon the only copy of your manuscript on a public transport, which is not that far from abandoning your baby on a transport? Undoubtedly an meeting, but what kind?

Cooper was inclined to exaggerate her own chaos and ineptitude