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The beloved novelist Jilly Cooper, who died suddenly at the age of 88, racked up sales of 11m copies of her assorted epic books over her half-century writing career. Cherished by all discerning readers over a specific age (forty-five), she was presented to a younger audience last year with the streaming series adaptation of Rivals.

Cooper's Fictional Universe

Devoted fans would have wanted to view the Rutshire chronicles in order: commencing with Riders, first published in 1985, in which the infamous Rupert Campbell-Black, cad, charmer, rider, is debuts. But that’s a side note – what was remarkable about watching Rivals as a binge-watch was how brilliantly Cooper’s fictional realm had remained relevant. The chronicles distilled the 80s: the power dressing and puffball skirts; the obsession with class; aristocrats looking down on the Technicolored nouveau riche, both ignoring everyone else while they snipped about how warm their champagne was; the gender dynamics, with harassment and abuse so routine they were almost characters in their own right, a duo you could trust to drive the narrative forward.

While Cooper might have occupied this period fully, she was never the typical fish not seeing the ocean because it’s ubiquitous. She had a empathy and an keen insight that you could easily miss from listening to her speak. All her creations, from the dog to the horse to her family to her foreign exchange sibling, was always “completely delightful” – unless, that is, they were “completely exquisite”. People got groped and further in Cooper’s work, but that was never acceptable – it’s astonishing how acceptable it is in many more highbrow books of the time.

Social Strata and Personality

She was well-to-do, which for practical purposes meant that her dad had to earn an income, but she’d have defined the social classes more by their customs. The bourgeoisie anxiously contemplated about everything, all the time – what others might think, mainly – and the elite didn’t give a … well “such things”. She was raunchy, at times incredibly so, but her language was never vulgar.

She’d describe her family life in idyllic language: “Dad went to battle and Mom was extremely anxious”. They were both utterly beautiful, engaged in a lifelong love match, and this Cooper replicated in her own marriage, to a editor of war books, Leo Cooper. She was 24, he was 27, the marriage wasn’t without hiccups (he was a unfaithful type), but she was consistently confident giving people the formula for a happy marriage, which is creaking bed springs but (big reveal), they’re squeaking with all the mirth. He avoided reading her books – he picked up Prudence once, when he had flu, and said it made him feel unwell. She wasn't bothered, and said it was returned: she wouldn’t be spotted reading battle accounts.

Forever keep a notebook – it’s very challenging, when you’re twenty-five, to remember what twenty-four felt like

Initial Novels

Prudence (the late 70s) was the fifth book in the Romance collection, which commenced with Emily in 1975. If you discovered Cooper from the later works, having commenced in her later universe, the early novels, alternatively called “the books named after posh girls” – also Imogen and Harriet – were almost there, every male lead feeling like a test-run for the iconic character, every main character a little bit weak. Plus, page for page (I haven’t actually run the numbers), there was less sex in them. They were a bit conservative on matters of decorum, women always worrying that men would think they’re loose, men saying ridiculous comments about why they favored virgins (comparably, apparently, as a genuine guy always wants to be the initial to open a container of coffee). I don’t know if I’d recommend reading these stories at a formative age. I thought for a while that that’s what the upper class actually believed.

They were, however, incredibly precisely constructed, high-functioning romances, which is considerably tougher than it seems. You felt Harriet’s surprise baby, Bella’s difficult relatives, Emily’s remote Scottish life – Cooper could transport you from an all-is-lost moment to a windfall of the emotions, and you could not ever, even in the beginning, identify how she achieved it. At one moment you’d be laughing at her meticulously detailed depictions of the bedding, the next you’d have tears in your eyes and little understanding how they got there.

Writing Wisdom

Questioned how to be a novelist, Cooper used to say the sort of advice that Ernest Hemingway would have said, if he could have been bothered to assist a beginner: employ all all of your perceptions, say how things aromatic and looked and audible and touched and tasted – it greatly improves the writing. But likely more helpful was: “Forever keep a journal – it’s very difficult, when you’re twenty-five, to recall what age 24 felt like.” That’s one of the initial observations you detect, in the longer, character-rich books, which have seventeen main characters rather than just one lead, all with decidedly aristocratic names, unless they’re Stateside, in which case they’re called a simple moniker. Even an generational gap of a few years, between two siblings, between a male and a woman, you can perceive in the speech.

A Literary Mystery

The backstory of Riders was so pitch-perfectly Jilly Cooper it can’t possibly have been accurate, except it certainly was real because a major newspaper ran an appeal about it at the era: she completed the complete book in 1970, long before the first books, took it into the West End and forgot it on a public transport. Some detail has been purposely excluded of this tale – what, for example, was so important in the city that you would abandon the only copy of your manuscript on a train, which is not that different from abandoning your child on a railway? Surely an assignation, but what sort?

Cooper was inclined to embellish her own disorder and ineptitude