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The beloved novelist Jilly Cooper, who passed away unexpectedly at the 88 years old, sold 11m copies of her various sweeping books over her 50-year writing career. Beloved by every sensible person over a certain age (45), she was presented to a modern audience last year with the TV adaptation of Rivals.

The Rutshire Chronicles

Cooper purists would have wanted to view the Rutshire chronicles in sequence: starting with Riders, originally published in 1985, in which the character Rupert Campbell-Black, rogue, heartbreaker, rider, is first introduced. But that’s a side note – what was notable about watching Rivals as a binge-watch was how brilliantly Cooper’s universe had remained relevant. The chronicles encapsulated the 80s: the power dressing and puffball skirts; the preoccupation with social class; the upper class sneering at the flashy new money, both ignoring everyone else while they quibbled about how room-temperature their champagne was; the gender dynamics, with unwanted advances and abuse so commonplace they were virtually characters in their own right, a pair you could rely on to advance the story.

While Cooper might have lived in this era fully, she was never the classic fish not noticing the ocean because it’s ubiquitous. She had a compassion and an perceptive wisdom that you might not expect from listening to her speak. Everyone, from the pet to the horse to her parents to her foreign exchange sibling, was always “absolutely sweet” – unless, that is, they were “completely exquisite”. People got groped and worse in Cooper’s work, but that was never acceptable – it’s remarkable how OK it is in many supposedly sophisticated books of the era.

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 classes more by their customs. The middle classes anxiously contemplated about all things, all the time – what society might think, primarily – and the upper classes didn’t give a … well “nonsense”. She was spicy, at times extremely, but her language was never coarse.

She’d describe her upbringing in idyllic language: “Dad went to the war and Mummy was extremely anxious”. They were both completely gorgeous, participating in a lifelong love match, and this Cooper mirrored in her own marriage, to a publisher of historical accounts, Leo Cooper. She was twenty-four, he was 27, the relationship wasn’t without hiccups (he was a unfaithful type), but she was never less than comfortable giving people the recipe for a successful union, which is noisy mattress but (crucial point), they’re squeaking with all the laughter. He never read her books – he tried Prudence once, when he had flu, and said it made him feel more ill. She wasn't bothered, and said it was reciprocated: she wouldn’t be caught reading war chronicles.

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

Early Works

Prudence (1978) was the fifth installment in the Romance collection, which commenced with Emily in 1975. If you discovered Cooper backwards, having commenced in Rutshire, the early novels, alternatively called “the books named after posh girls” – also Bella and Harriet – were near misses, every male lead feeling like a prototype for Campbell-Black, every female lead a little bit drippy. Plus, chapter for chapter (I haven’t actually run the numbers), there wasn’t as much sex in them. They were a bit reserved on topics of propriety, women always worrying that men would think they’re loose, men saying batshit things about why they favored virgins (similarly, apparently, as a genuine guy always wants to be the initial to break a tin of Nescafé). I don’t know if I’d recommend reading these books at a formative age. I assumed for a while that that was what the upper class actually believed.

They were, however, remarkably precisely constructed, successful romances, which is much harder than it sounds. You felt Harriet’s surprise baby, Bella’s annoying family-by-marriage, Emily’s remote Scottish life – Cooper could guide you from an hopeless moment to a windfall of the soul, and you could not once, even in the initial stages, put your finger on how she achieved it. One minute you’d be laughing at her highly specific depictions of the sheets, the following moment you’d have emotional response and little understanding how they arrived.

Authorial Advice

Questioned 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 bothered to assist a beginner: employ all five of your faculties, say how things aromatic and looked and audible and tactile and palatable – it really lifts the writing. But probably more useful was: “Constantly keep a notebook – it’s very challenging, when you’re twenty-five, to recall what being 24 felt like.” That’s one of the primary realizations you observe, in the longer, densely peopled books, which have seventeen main characters rather than just a single protagonist, all with extremely posh names, unless they’re from the US, in which case they’re called a simple moniker. Even an generational gap of several years, between two sisters, between a gentleman and a lady, you can perceive in the conversation.

A Literary Mystery

The historical account of Riders was so perfectly characteristically Cooper it might not have been true, except it certainly was factual because a London paper made a public request about it at the period: she finished the whole manuscript in the early 70s, prior to the first books, took it into the downtown and left it on a public transport. Some texture has been purposely excluded of this anecdote – what, for instance, was so significant in the urban area that you would forget the unique draft of your novel on a bus, which is not that unlike abandoning your infant on a train? Surely an rendezvous, but which type?

Cooper was wont to exaggerate her own chaos and ineptitude