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The beloved novelist Jilly Cooper, who died suddenly at the 88 years old, racked up sales of 11m books of her many sweeping books over her half-century literary career. Cherished by anyone with any sense over a certain age (forty-five), she was brought to a younger audience last year with the Disney+ adaptation of Rivals.

Cooper's Fictional Universe

Devoted fans would have preferred to watch the Rutshire chronicles in order: starting with Riders, initially released in the mid-80s, in which Rupert Campbell-Black, scoundrel, heartbreaker, rider, is debuts. But that’s a sidebar – what was remarkable about viewing Rivals as a box set was how well Cooper’s universe had remained relevant. The chronicles captured the 1980s: the power dressing and puffball skirts; the obsession with class; the upper class sneering at the ostentatious newly wealthy, both ignoring everyone else while they snipped about how warm their sparkling wine was; the intimate power struggles, with harassment and misconduct so routine they were virtually characters in their own right, a duo you could rely on to move the plot along.

While Cooper might have inhabited this period completely, she was never the typical fish not seeing the ocean because it’s ubiquitous. She had a humanity and an perceptive wisdom that you could easily miss from hearing her talk. Every character, from the pet to the pony to her mother and father to her foreign exchange sibling, was always “completely delightful” – unless, that is, they were “completely exquisite”. People got assaulted and worse in Cooper’s work, but that was never OK – it’s remarkable how tolerated it is in many far more literary books of the period.

Background and Behavior

She was upper-middle-class, which for practical purposes meant that her parent had to hold down a job, but she’d have defined the social classes more by their values. The middle-class people worried about every little detail, all the time – what society might think, mostly – and the aristocracy didn’t give a … well “stuff”. She was raunchy, at times extremely, but her prose was never vulgar.

She’d narrate her family life in idyllic language: “Daddy went to Dunkirk and Mom was deeply concerned”. They were both completely gorgeous, involved in a lifelong love match, and this Cooper emulated in her own partnership, to a businessman of historical accounts, Leo Cooper. She was twenty-four, he was twenty-seven, the union wasn’t perfect (he was a unfaithful type), but she was never less than comfortable giving people the secret for a successful union, which is creaking bed springs but (big reveal), they’re creaking with all the mirth. He didn't read her books – he read Prudence once, when he had flu, and said it made him feel worse. She wasn't bothered, and said it was returned: she wouldn’t be spotted reading battle accounts.

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

Initial Novels

Prudence (1978) was the fifth book in the Romance series, which commenced with Emily in 1975. If you approached Cooper in reverse, having begun in the main series, the early novels, alternatively called “the novels named after affluent ladies” – also Octavia and Harriet – were near misses, every protagonist feeling like a prototype for Rupert, every female lead a little bit weak. Plus, page for page (I haven’t actually run the numbers), there wasn’t as much sex in them. They were a bit uptight on matters of decorum, women always fretting that men would think they’re immoral, men saying ridiculous comments about why they favored virgins (similarly, apparently, as a real man always wants to be the initial to break a container of coffee). I don’t know if I’d suggest reading these novels at a impressionable age. I assumed for a while that that was what posh people genuinely felt.

They were, however, incredibly precisely constructed, successful romances, which is far more difficult than it appears. You lived Harriet’s unplanned pregnancy, Bella’s pissy family-by-marriage, Emily’s loneliness in Scotland – Cooper could guide you from an all-is-lost moment to a jackpot of the emotions, and you could not ever, even in the initial stages, pinpoint how she did it. One minute you’d be laughing at her highly specific descriptions of the bedding, the following moment you’d have emotional response and no idea how they appeared.

Literary Guidance

Asked how to be a author, Cooper used to say the kind of thing that Ernest Hemingway would have said, if he could have been inclined to guide a aspiring writer: use all five of your senses, say how things aromatic and appeared and audible and felt and tasted – it significantly enhances the prose. But perhaps more practical was: “Forever keep a journal – it’s very hard, when you’re twenty-five, to remember what being 24 felt like.” That’s one of the initial observations you notice, in the more detailed, densely peopled books, which have 17 heroines 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 a few years, between two siblings, between a gentleman and a lady, you can perceive in the dialogue.

An Author's Tale

The backstory of Riders was so perfectly Jilly Cooper it might not have been real, except it definitely is real because a major newspaper published a notice about it at the period: she wrote the complete book in 1970, well before the Romances, took it into the city center and misplaced it on a vehicle. Some detail has been deliberately left out of this tale – what, for instance, was so significant in the city that you would abandon the sole version of your novel on a public transport, which is not that different from abandoning your child on a transport? Surely an rendezvous, but which type?

Cooper was prone to amp up her own disorder and haplessness