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The celebrated author 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 career in writing. Adored by anyone with any sense over a certain age (mid-forties), she was brought to a modern audience last year with the Disney+ adaptation of Rivals.

Cooper's Fictional Universe

Cooper purists would have liked to see the Rutshire chronicles in chronological order: beginning with Riders, originally published in the mid-80s, in which the infamous Rupert Campbell-Black, scoundrel, charmer, horse rider, is initially presented. But that’s a sidebar – what was striking about viewing Rivals as a complete series was how well Cooper’s world had aged. The chronicles distilled the 1980s: the power dressing and puffball skirts; the obsession with class; aristocrats looking down on the flashy new money, both ignoring everyone else while they complained about how warm their sparkling wine was; the sexual politics, with inappropriate behavior and misconduct so everyday they were almost characters in their own right, a duo you could rely on to advance the story.

While Cooper might have occupied this period totally, she was never the classic fish not seeing the ocean because it’s ubiquitous. She had a humanity and an perceptive wisdom that you maybe wouldn’t guess from listening to her speak. Everyone, from the canine to the pony to her mother and father to her French exchange’s brother, was always “utterly charming” – unless, that is, they were “completely exquisite”. People got harassed and more in Cooper’s work, but that was never acceptable – it’s surprising how OK it is in many more highbrow books of the period.

Background and Behavior

She was upper-middle-class, which for practical purposes meant that her parent had to earn an income, but she’d have described the social classes more by their values. The middle-class people worried about all things, all the time – what others might think, mainly – and the elite didn’t bother with “nonsense”. She was spicy, at times extremely, but her language was never vulgar.

She’d describe her childhood in fairytale terms: “Dad went to Dunkirk and Mom was terribly, terribly worried”. They were both completely gorgeous, engaged in a lifelong love match, and this Cooper mirrored in her own union, to a businessman of military histories, Leo Cooper. She was 24, he was in his late twenties, the union wasn’t without hiccups (he was a unfaithful type), but she was consistently at ease giving people the secret for a happy marriage, which is noisy mattress but (key insight), they’re creaking with all the laughter. He avoided reading her books – he read Prudence once, when he had a cold, and said it made him feel more ill. She didn’t mind, and said it was returned: she wouldn’t be seen dead reading war chronicles.

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

Initial Novels

Prudence (1978) was the fifth installment in the Romance series, which commenced with Emily in the mid-70s. If you approached Cooper backwards, having started in her later universe, the initial books, AKA “the books named after affluent ladies” – also Imogen and Harriet – were close but no cigar, every hero feeling like a test-run for Campbell-Black, every heroine a little bit weak. Plus, chapter for chapter (Without exact data), there was less sex in them. They were a bit reserved on topics of decorum, women always worrying that men would think they’re immoral, men saying outrageous statements about why they liked virgins (in much the same way, seemingly, as a genuine guy always wants to be the primary to unseal a container of Nescafé). I don’t know if I’d advise reading these novels at a impressionable age. I assumed for a while that that is what posh people really thought.

They were, however, incredibly precisely constructed, high-functioning romances, which is much harder than it sounds. You lived Harriet’s unwanted pregnancy, Bella’s pissy relatives, Emily’s remote Scottish life – Cooper could transport you from an desperate moment to a lottery win of the heart, and you could not once, even in the early days, identify how she did it. Suddenly you’d be chuckling at her incredibly close descriptions of the bed linen, the subsequently you’d have tears in your eyes and no idea how they appeared.

Literary Guidance

Inquired how to be a writer, Cooper used to say the kind of thing that Ernest Hemingway would have said, if he could have been arsed to guide a beginner: use all all of your senses, say how things aromatic and appeared and audible and felt and palatable – it significantly enhances the narrative. But perhaps more practical was: “Constantly keep a journal – it’s very difficult, when you’re twenty-five, to remember what twenty-four felt like.” That’s one of the first things you observe, in the longer, more populated books, which have 17 heroines rather than just a single protagonist, all with decidedly aristocratic names, unless they’re American, in which case they’re called a simple moniker. Even an years apart of four years, between two sisters, between a male and a lady, you can detect in the conversation.

An Author's Tale

The origin story of Riders was so exactly Jilly Cooper it might not have been real, except it certainly was real because London’s Evening Standard published a notice about it at the era: she wrote the entire draft in 1970, long before the Romances, took it into the West End and left it on a bus. Some detail has been intentionally omitted of this anecdote – what, for example, was so important in the city that you would leave the unique draft of your novel on a bus, which is not that far from leaving your baby on a train? Undoubtedly an assignation, but which type?

Cooper was wont to embellish her own chaos and clumsiness