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The beloved novelist Jilly Cooper, who left us unexpectedly at the age of 88, sold 11 million copies of her various sweeping books over her five-decade writing career. Adored by every sensible person over a particular age (mid-forties), she was introduced to a new generation last year with the streaming series adaptation of Rivals.

The Rutshire Chronicles

Longtime readers would have preferred to watch the Rutshire chronicles in chronological order: commencing with Riders, initially released in the mid-80s, in which the infamous Rupert Campbell-Black, scoundrel, charmer, equestrian, is first introduced. But that’s a minor point – what was striking about watching Rivals as a binge-watch was how effectively Cooper’s universe had remained relevant. The chronicles distilled the 80s: the broad shoulders and voluminous skirts; the fixation on status; the upper class sneering at the Technicolored nouveau riche, both overlooking everyone else while they quibbled about how lukewarm their bubbly was; the intimate power struggles, with unwanted advances and assault so everyday they were virtually figures in their own right, a pair you could count on to move the plot along.

While Cooper might have occupied this age fully, she was never the typical fish not perceiving the ocean because it’s everywhere. She had a empathy and an perceptive wisdom that you maybe wouldn’t guess from hearing her talk. Everyone, from the dog to the equine to her parents to her foreign exchange sibling, was always “utterly charming” – unless, that is, they were “completely exquisite”. People got groped and more in Cooper’s work, but that was never acceptable – it’s remarkable how tolerated it is in many supposedly sophisticated books of the time.

Class and Character

She was upper-middle-class, which for real-world terms meant that her father had to work for a living, but she’d have described the strata more by their mores. The middle-class people anxiously contemplated about every little detail, all the time – what other people might think, mainly – and the elite didn’t give a … well “such things”. She was raunchy, at times incredibly so, but her language was always refined.

She’d describe her upbringing in fairytale terms: “Daddy went to Dunkirk and Mom was extremely anxious”. They were both utterly beautiful, participating in a eternal partnership, and this Cooper replicated in her own union, to a publisher of military histories, Leo Cooper. She was twenty-four, he was 27, the relationship wasn’t without hiccups (he was a unfaithful type), but she was always confident giving people the formula for a blissful partnership, which is creaking bed springs but (big reveal), they’re creaking with all the joy. He never read her books – he picked up Prudence once, when he had a cold, and said it made him feel more ill. She wasn't bothered, and said it was returned: she wouldn’t be spotted reading war chronicles.

Forever keep a journal – it’s very difficult, when you’re mid-twenties, to recall what age 24 felt like

Initial Novels

Prudence (1978) was the fifth book in the Romance collection, which commenced with Emily in 1975. If you came to Cooper from the later works, having begun in her later universe, the early novels, alternatively called “those ones named after upper-class women” – also Bella and Harriet – were close but no cigar, every protagonist feeling like a test-run for Rupert, every main character a little bit weak. Plus, chapter for chapter (I can't verify statistically), there was less sex in them. They were a bit conservative on topics of decorum, women always fretting that men would think they’re immoral, men saying ridiculous comments about why they preferred virgins (in much the same way, ostensibly, as a real man always wants to be the initial to open a container of instant coffee). I don’t know if I’d suggest reading these stories at a formative age. I thought for a while that that was what affluent individuals really thought.

They were, however, remarkably tightly written, high-functioning romances, which is much harder than it appears. You felt Harriet’s unplanned pregnancy, Bella’s pissy family-by-marriage, Emily’s loneliness in Scotland – Cooper could guide you from an hopeless moment to a jackpot of the heart, and you could never, even in the beginning, put your finger on how she managed it. At one moment you’d be smiling at her meticulously detailed accounts of the bedding, the following moment you’d have emotional response and no idea how they got there.

Authorial Advice

Asked how to be a novelist, Cooper used to say the type of guidance that the literary giant would have said, if he could have been inclined to guide a novice: use all 5 of your perceptions, say how things aromatic and looked and audible and felt and tasted – it really lifts the prose. But probably more useful was: “Forever keep a diary – it’s very hard, when you’re 25, to recall what twenty-four felt like.” That’s one of the primary realizations you observe, in the more extensive, character-rich books, which have seventeen main characters rather than just one, all with decidedly aristocratic names, unless they’re American, in which case they’re called a common name. Even an generational gap of a few years, between two sisters, between a male and a woman, you can hear in the conversation.

The Lost Manuscript

The origin story of Riders was so pitch-perfectly typical of the author it might not have been true, except it definitely is real because London’s Evening Standard ran an appeal about it at the time: she wrote the whole manuscript in the early 70s, prior to the first books, took it into the West End and left it on a public transport. Some texture has been purposely excluded of this tale – what, for case, was so important in the urban area that you would forget the only copy of your manuscript on a public transport, which is not that far from forgetting your child on a train? Certainly an assignation, but what sort?

Cooper was wont to exaggerate her own messiness and clumsiness