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The beloved novelist Jilly Cooper, who left us unexpectedly at the 88 years of age, achieved sales of 11m volumes of her assorted sweeping books over her five-decade literary career. Cherished by anyone with any sense over a specific age (forty-five), she was introduced to a modern audience last year with the TV adaptation of Rivals.

Cooper's Fictional Universe

Devoted fans would have wanted to view the Rutshire chronicles in order: beginning with Riders, originally published in the mid-80s, in which Rupert Campbell-Black, rogue, charmer, rider, is initially presented. But that’s a minor point – what was notable about viewing Rivals as a box set was how brilliantly Cooper’s universe had aged. The chronicles captured the 80s: the broad shoulders and voluminous skirts; the obsession with class; the upper class looking down on the Technicolored nouveau riche, both ignoring everyone else while they complained about how room-temperature their champagne was; the gender dynamics, with harassment and misconduct so everyday they were virtually personas in their own right, a duo you could count on to drive the narrative forward.

While Cooper might have lived in this period totally, she was never the classic fish not perceiving the ocean because it’s ubiquitous. She had a compassion and an observational intelligence that you maybe wouldn’t guess from hearing her talk. Everyone, from the canine to the pony to her mother and father to her international student's relative, was always “utterly charming” – unless, that is, they were “absolutely divine”. People got harassed and further in Cooper’s work, but that was never acceptable – it’s remarkable how tolerated it is in many more highbrow books of the era.

Class and Character

She was affluent middle-class, which for real-world terms meant that her father had to hold down a job, but she’d have characterized the strata more by their customs. The middle-class people fretted about everything, all the time – what others might think, mainly – and the elite didn’t bother with “nonsense”. She was risqué, at times very much, but her prose was never vulgar.

She’d narrate her upbringing in storybook prose: “Dad went to the war and Mom was extremely anxious”. They were both completely gorgeous, engaged in a lifelong love match, and this Cooper mirrored in her own partnership, 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 philanderer), but she was consistently comfortable giving people the recipe 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 read Prudence once, when he had flu, and said it made him feel worse. She didn’t mind, and said it was returned: she wouldn’t be spotted reading military history.

Forever keep a diary – it’s very challenging, when you’re mid-twenties, to recollect what being 24 felt like

Initial Novels

Prudence (1978) was the fifth volume in the Romance series, which started with Emily in 1975. If you approached Cooper backwards, having started in Rutshire, the Romances, also known as “the novels named after upper-class women” – also Octavia and Harriet – were almost there, every protagonist feeling like a prototype for Campbell-Black, every female lead a little bit drippy. Plus, line for line (Without exact data), there was less sex in them. They were a bit conservative on topics of propriety, women always worrying that men would think they’re immoral, men saying outrageous statements about why they favored virgins (in much the same way, apparently, as a real man always wants to be the initial to open a tin of Nescafé). I don’t know if I’d recommend reading these stories at a impressionable age. I believed for a while that that is what the upper class actually believed.

They were, however, remarkably tightly written, effective romances, which is much harder than it sounds. You felt Harriet’s unwanted pregnancy, Bella’s annoying relatives, Emily’s Scottish isolation – Cooper could transport you from an all-is-lost moment to a windfall of the soul, and you could not once, even in the early days, identify how she did it. At one moment you’d be laughing at her highly specific descriptions of the bed linen, the subsequently you’d have watery eyes and no idea how they appeared.

Authorial Advice

Questioned 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 inclined to guide a aspiring writer: utilize all 5 of your perceptions, say how things aromatic and seemed and audible and touched and palatable – it greatly improves the prose. But likely more helpful was: “Constantly keep a diary – it’s very hard, when you’re twenty-five, to recall what being 24 felt like.” That’s one of the primary realizations you observe, in the longer, character-rich books, which have seventeen main characters rather than just one lead, all with very upper-class names, unless they’re Stateside, in which case they’re called a common name. Even an years apart of four years, between two siblings, between a man and a female, you can hear in the speech.

The Lost Manuscript

The backstory of Riders was so pitch-perfectly Jilly Cooper it can’t possibly have been true, except it absolutely is real because London’s Evening Standard published a notice about it at the period: she completed the entire draft in the early 70s, well before the first books, took it into the West End and left it on a bus. Some detail has been intentionally omitted of this story – what, for instance, was so important in the West End that you would abandon the only copy of your manuscript on a public transport, which is not that far from forgetting your infant on a railway? Undoubtedly an meeting, but which type?

Cooper was prone to exaggerate her own disorder and ineptitude