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Jilly Cooper, who passed away unexpectedly at the 88 years old, racked up sales of 11 million books of her assorted grand books over her five-decade literary career. Cherished by every sensible person over a specific age (forty-five), she was presented to a younger audience last year with the TV adaptation of Rivals.

The Rutshire Chronicles

Longtime readers would have wanted to view the Rutshire chronicles in sequence: beginning with Riders, originally published in 1985, in which Rupert Campbell-Black, rogue, charmer, horse rider, is first introduced. But that’s a minor point – what was striking about viewing Rivals as a box set was how effectively Cooper’s universe had remained relevant. The chronicles distilled the 80s: the power dressing and voluminous skirts; the obsession with class; nobility disdaining the Technicolored nouveau riche, both dismissing everyone else while they snipped about how lukewarm their champagne was; the sexual politics, with inappropriate behavior and misconduct so routine they were virtually personas in their own right, a pair you could rely on to move the plot along.

While Cooper might have occupied this period completely, she was never the proverbial fish not noticing the ocean because it’s all around. She had a humanity and an keen insight that you might not expect from hearing her talk. All her creations, from the canine to the equine to her family to her foreign exchange sibling, was always “utterly charming” – unless, that is, they were “absolutely divine”. People got assaulted and further in Cooper’s work, but that was never OK – it’s surprising how acceptable it is in many more highbrow books of the time.

Class and Character

She was affluent middle-class, which for practical purposes meant that her parent had to hold down a job, but she’d have defined the strata more by their mores. The middle classes worried about everything, all the time – what others might think, mostly – and the aristocracy didn’t bother with “nonsense”. She was spicy, at times extremely, but her dialogue was never coarse.

She’d describe her childhood in fairytale terms: “Father went to the war and Mother was terribly, terribly worried”. They were both completely gorgeous, engaged in a enduring romance, and this Cooper mirrored in her own marriage, to a publisher of historical accounts, Leo Cooper. She was twenty-four, he was 27, the union wasn’t smooth sailing (he was a bit of a shagger), but she was consistently confident giving people the recipe for a blissful partnership, which is creaking bed springs but (crucial point), they’re creaking with all the joy. He never read her books – he tried Prudence once, when he had a cold, and said it made him feel worse. She wasn't bothered, and said it was mutual: she wouldn’t be caught reading military history.

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

The Romance Series

Prudence (the late 70s) was the fifth installment in the Romance collection, which commenced with Emily in 1975. If you approached Cooper from the later works, having begun in her later universe, the initial books, AKA “the books named after posh girls” – also Bella and Harriet – were almost there, every male lead 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 was less sex in them. They were a bit uptight on topics of decorum, women always worrying that men would think they’re promiscuous, men saying batshit things about why they preferred virgins (in much the same way, ostensibly, as a genuine guy always wants to be the primary to break a tin of Nescafé). I don’t know if I’d suggest reading these novels at a young age. I thought for a while that that is what affluent individuals actually believed.

They were, however, incredibly precisely constructed, effective romances, which is considerably tougher than it appears. You felt Harriet’s unplanned pregnancy, Bella’s difficult relatives, Emily’s remote Scottish life – Cooper could take you from an desperate moment to a jackpot of the heart, and you could not ever, even in the initial stages, identify how she achieved it. One minute you’d be chuckling at her incredibly close descriptions of the bed linen, the next you’d have watery eyes and uncertainty how they appeared.

Authorial Advice

Questioned how to be a author, Cooper would often state the type of guidance that the literary giant would have said, if he could have been arsed to help out a novice: use all 5 of your faculties, say how things scented and looked and heard and tactile and tasted – it significantly enhances the writing. But likely more helpful was: “Always keep a journal – it’s very difficult, when you’re mid-twenties, to remember what being 24 felt like.” That’s one of the primary realizations you detect, in the longer, more populated books, which have numerous female leads rather than just one, all with very upper-class names, unless they’re from the US, in which case they’re called a common name. Even an years apart of several years, between two sisters, between a gentleman and a lady, you can detect in the speech.

A Literary Mystery

The backstory of Riders was so perfectly typical of the author it might not have been real, except it absolutely is real because London’s Evening Standard made a public request about it at the time: she completed the entire draft in the early 70s, well before the first books, carried it into the city center and forgot it on a vehicle. Some context has been intentionally omitted of this story – what, for case, was so important in the urban area that you would leave the only copy of your manuscript on a public transport, which is not that far from leaving your infant on a transport? Undoubtedly an meeting, but what sort?

Cooper was prone to embellish her own chaos and clumsiness