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The beloved novelist Jilly Cooper, who died suddenly at the age of 88, racked up sales of 11 million books of her various sweeping books over her five-decade career in writing. Cherished by anyone with any sense over a particular age (45), she was brought to a younger audience last year with the TV adaptation of Rivals.

The Beloved Series

Cooper purists would have wanted to view the Rutshire chronicles in order: beginning with Riders, first published in 1985, in which the infamous Rupert Campbell-Black, scoundrel, philanderer, equestrian, is initially presented. But that’s a side note – what was remarkable about watching Rivals as a box set was how effectively Cooper’s universe had aged. The chronicles distilled the 1980s: the shoulder pads and puffball skirts; the preoccupation with social class; aristocrats looking down on the flashy new money, both overlooking everyone else while they complained about how warm their bubbly was; the sexual politics, with inappropriate behavior and assault so routine they were almost characters in their own right, a pair you could trust to drive the narrative forward.

While Cooper might have inhabited this period totally, she was never the proverbial fish not seeing the ocean because it’s ubiquitous. She had a compassion and an observational intelligence that you maybe wouldn’t guess from listening to her speak. Every character, from the canine to the pony to her family to her foreign exchange sibling, was always “absolutely sweet” – unless, that is, they were “truly heavenly”. People got assaulted and worse in Cooper’s work, but that was never OK – it’s remarkable how OK it is in many supposedly sophisticated books of the time.

Social Strata and Personality

She was well-to-do, which for real-world terms meant that her father had to hold down a job, but she’d have characterized the social classes more by their mores. The bourgeoisie fretted about every little detail, all the time – what society might think, mostly – and the aristocracy didn’t bother with “such things”. She was risqué, at times very much, but her language was never coarse.

She’d recount her upbringing in idyllic language: “Daddy went to the war and Mummy was extremely anxious”. They were both absolutely stunning, involved in a lifelong love match, and this Cooper emulated in her own partnership, to a businessman of historical accounts, Leo Cooper. She was in her mid-twenties, he was 27, the relationship wasn’t without hiccups (he was a unfaithful type), but she was consistently comfortable giving people the recipe for a happy marriage, which is noisy mattress but (big reveal), they’re noisy with all the joy. He avoided reading her books – he tried 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 seen dead reading military history.

Always keep a notebook – it’s very hard, when you’re mid-twenties, to remember what age 24 felt like

Initial Novels

Prudence (the late 70s) was the fifth book in the Romance novels, which started with Emily in 1975. If you came to Cooper in reverse, having begun in her later universe, the initial books, alternatively called “those ones named after posh girls” – also Octavia and Harriet – were near misses, every male lead feeling like a trial version for the iconic character, every heroine a little bit drippy. 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 issues of propriety, women always fretting that men would think they’re loose, men saying ridiculous comments about why they preferred virgins (similarly, ostensibly, as a real man always wants to be the initial to unseal a tin of coffee). I don’t know if I’d suggest reading these novels at a impressionable age. I believed for a while that that’s what affluent individuals genuinely felt.

They were, however, remarkably tightly written, high-functioning romances, which is considerably tougher than it sounds. You felt Harriet’s unplanned pregnancy, Bella’s pissy family-by-marriage, Emily’s Scottish isolation – Cooper could transport 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 managed it. At one moment you’d be chuckling at her highly specific accounts of the sheets, the following moment you’d have watery eyes and uncertainty how they arrived.

Authorial Advice

Inquired how to be a novelist, 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 5 of your perceptions, say how things scented and appeared and sounded and tactile and palatable – it significantly enhances the prose. But probably more useful was: “Forever keep a notebook – it’s very hard, when you’re mid-twenties, to recall what being 24 felt like.” That’s one of the first things you observe, in the more detailed, more populated books, which have 17 heroines rather than just one lead, all with extremely posh names, unless they’re from the US, in which case they’re called Helen. Even an years apart of four years, between two relatives, between a man and a woman, you can hear in the conversation.

A Literary Mystery

The backstory of Riders was so perfectly Jilly Cooper it couldn't possibly have been accurate, except it definitely is true because a London paper made a public request about it at the era: she completed the complete book in 1970, prior to the early novels, brought it into the downtown and left it on a vehicle. Some context has been deliberately left out of this anecdote – what, for case, was so crucial in the urban area that you would leave the only copy of your manuscript on a train, which is not that unlike leaving your child on a train? Certainly an meeting, but what sort?

Cooper was prone to embellish her own disorder and ineptitude