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Jilly Cooper, who died suddenly at the 88 years of age, sold eleven million volumes of her many epic books over her 50-year literary career. Cherished by every sensible person over a specific age (mid-forties), she was introduced to a younger audience last year with the Disney+ adaptation of Rivals.

Cooper's Fictional Universe

Longtime readers would have liked to see the Rutshire chronicles in sequence: commencing with Riders, originally published in 1985, in which Rupert Campbell-Black, cad, philanderer, rider, is first introduced. But that’s a sidebar – what was remarkable about viewing Rivals as a box set was how brilliantly Cooper’s fictional realm had aged. The chronicles encapsulated the 80s: the power dressing and bubble skirts; the obsession with class; the upper class disdaining the flashy new money, both ignoring everyone else while they complained about how warm their bubbly was; the intimate power struggles, with unwanted advances and assault so everyday they were virtually figures in their own right, a double act you could rely on to advance the story.

While Cooper might have inhabited this age fully, she was never the classic fish not seeing the ocean because it’s ubiquitous. She had a humanity and an keen insight that you might not expect from listening to her speak. Every character, from the dog to the horse to her mother and father to her French exchange’s brother, was always “utterly charming” – unless, that is, they were “completely exquisite”. People got groped and worse in Cooper’s work, but that was never condoned – it’s surprising how acceptable it is in many supposedly sophisticated books of the time.

Social Strata and Personality

She was upper-middle-class, which for real-world terms meant that her dad had to work for a living, but she’d have defined the social classes more by their mores. The middle classes worried about all things, all the time – what society might think, mainly – and the aristocracy didn’t bother with “such things”. She was raunchy, at times incredibly so, but her prose was never coarse.

She’d describe her family life in idyllic language: “Daddy went to Dunkirk and Mother was extremely anxious”. They were both utterly beautiful, participating in a eternal partnership, and this Cooper emulated in her own partnership, to a publisher of war books, Leo Cooper. She was in her mid-twenties, he was twenty-seven, the relationship wasn’t without hiccups (he was a bit of a shagger), but she was always at ease giving people the recipe for a successful union, which is squeaky bed but (big reveal), they’re noisy with all the mirth. He avoided reading her books – he tried Prudence once, when he had flu, and said it made him feel more ill. She took no offense, and said it was reciprocated: she wouldn’t be caught reading war chronicles.

Constantly keep a journal – it’s very difficult, when you’re mid-twenties, to recall what twenty-four felt like

Early Works

Prudence (1978) was the fifth volume in the Romance collection, which began with Emily in the mid-70s. If you approached Cooper from the later works, having commenced in the main series, the initial books, AKA “the novels named after posh girls” – also Octavia and Harriet – were near misses, every male lead feeling like a trial version for Campbell-Black, every main character a little bit weak. Plus, line for line (Without exact data), there wasn't the same quantity of sex in them. They were a bit reserved on topics of modesty, women always fretting that men would think they’re promiscuous, men saying batshit things about why they preferred virgins (similarly, ostensibly, as a true gentleman always wants to be the primary to break a jar of Nescafé). I don’t know if I’d recommend reading these novels at a formative age. I assumed for a while that that’s what affluent individuals genuinely felt.

They were, however, incredibly precisely constructed, high-functioning romances, which is considerably tougher than it appears. You experienced Harriet’s unplanned pregnancy, Bella’s pissy relatives, Emily’s Scottish isolation – Cooper could guide you from an all-is-lost moment to a jackpot of the soul, and you could never, even in the initial stages, identify how she did it. Suddenly you’d be chuckling at her meticulously detailed descriptions of the bedding, the following moment you’d have emotional response and uncertainty how they arrived.

Authorial Advice

Inquired how to be a novelist, Cooper would often state the type of guidance that the famous author would have said, if he could have been inclined to guide a beginner: use all 5 of your perceptions, say how things scented and looked and audible and felt and palatable – it greatly improves the narrative. But likely more helpful was: “Always keep a notebook – it’s very challenging, when you’re 25, to recall what being 24 felt like.” That’s one of the primary realizations you observe, in the more extensive, more populated books, which have numerous female leads rather than just one, all with decidedly aristocratic names, unless they’re from the US, in which case they’re called a simple moniker. Even an generational gap of a few years, between two sisters, between a male and a woman, you can detect in the conversation.

A Literary Mystery

The backstory of Riders was so pitch-perfectly typical of the author it might not have been real, except it definitely is factual because a major newspaper published a notice about it at the era: she wrote the complete book in 1970, prior to the first books, brought it into the city center and forgot it on a public transport. Some detail has been purposely excluded of this anecdote – what, for case, was so crucial in the West End that you would forget the sole version of your manuscript on a bus, which is not that unlike leaving your baby on a railway? Certainly an assignation, but what kind?

Cooper was prone to amp up her own disorder and ineptitude