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The celebrated author Jilly Cooper, who passed away unexpectedly at the 88 years of age, racked up sales of eleven million copies of her various epic books over her 50-year career in writing. Beloved by every sensible person over a specific age (45), she was presented to a new generation last year with the streaming series adaptation of Rivals.

The Rutshire Chronicles

Devoted fans would have liked to watch the Rutshire chronicles in order: beginning with Riders, first published in the mid-80s, in which the character Rupert Campbell-Black, scoundrel, charmer, rider, is initially presented. But that’s a minor point – what was striking about watching Rivals as a binge-watch was how well Cooper’s fictional realm had stood the test of time. The chronicles captured the 1980s: the broad shoulders and voluminous skirts; the obsession with class; nobility sneering at the flashy new money, both ignoring everyone else while they quibbled about how warm their sparkling wine was; the intimate power struggles, with inappropriate behavior and abuse so everyday they were virtually personas in their own right, a duo you could rely on to move the plot along.

While Cooper might have occupied this era fully, she was never the typical fish not noticing the ocean because it’s everywhere. She had a compassion and an keen insight that you maybe wouldn’t guess from her public persona. Every character, from the pet to the equine to her family to her French exchange’s brother, was always “utterly charming” – unless, that is, they were “truly heavenly”. People got groped and more in Cooper’s work, but that was never OK – it’s astonishing how OK it is in many more highbrow books of the time.

Background and Behavior

She was affluent middle-class, 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 customs. The middle classes anxiously contemplated about every little detail, all the time – what others might think, mostly – and the upper classes didn’t bother with “such things”. She was risqué, at times incredibly so, but her prose was never coarse.

She’d describe her family life in storybook prose: “Daddy went to Dunkirk and Mother was extremely anxious”. They were both completely gorgeous, engaged in a enduring romance, and this Cooper emulated in her own marriage, to a businessman of historical accounts, Leo Cooper. She was 24, he was twenty-seven, the union wasn’t perfect (he was a unfaithful type), but she was always confident giving people the secret for a happy marriage, which is creaking bed springs but (key insight), they’re squeaking with all the laughter. He never read her books – he read Prudence once, when he had a cold, and said it made him feel worse. She didn’t mind, and said it was reciprocated: she wouldn’t be seen dead reading battle accounts.

Always keep a notebook – it’s very challenging, when you’re 25, to recall what being 24 felt like

Initial Novels

Prudence (1978) was the fifth volume in the Romance novels, which began with Emily in the mid-70s. If you approached Cooper from the later works, having commenced in her later universe, the early novels, AKA “the books named after posh girls” – also Bella and Harriet – were near misses, every male lead feeling like a test-run for the iconic character, every heroine a little bit drippy. Plus, chapter for chapter (I can't verify statistically), there was less sex in them. They were a bit uptight on issues of decorum, women always fretting that men would think they’re immoral, men saying ridiculous comments about why they favored virgins (comparably, apparently, as a true gentleman always wants to be the initial to open a tin of instant coffee). I don’t know if I’d suggest reading these stories at a formative age. I assumed for a while that that’s what affluent individuals genuinely felt.

They were, however, remarkably well-crafted, effective romances, which is much harder than it seems. You felt Harriet’s surprise baby, Bella’s pissy in-laws, Emily’s remote Scottish life – Cooper could take you from an hopeless moment to a jackpot of the soul, and you could never, even in the initial stages, identify how she managed it. Suddenly you’d be laughing at her meticulously detailed descriptions of the bedding, the subsequently you’d have emotional response and no idea how they appeared.

Literary Guidance

Questioned how to be a novelist, Cooper used to say the type of guidance that Ernest Hemingway would have said, if he could have been arsed to assist a novice: use all all of your senses, say how things scented and looked and sounded and tactile and palatable – it greatly improves the prose. But likely more helpful was: “Forever keep a notebook – it’s very difficult, when you’re twenty-five, to remember what being 24 felt like.” That’s one of the first things you notice, in the longer, densely peopled books, which have numerous female leads rather than just a single protagonist, all with very upper-class names, unless they’re Stateside, in which case they’re called a common name. Even an generational gap of four years, between two sisters, between a man and a woman, you can hear in the dialogue.

A Literary Mystery

The backstory of Riders was so pitch-perfectly typical of the author it couldn't possibly have been accurate, except it definitely is factual because a major newspaper made a public request about it at the era: she wrote the entire draft in 1970, prior to the Romances, brought it into the downtown and misplaced it on a bus. Some context has been purposely excluded of this anecdote – what, for instance, was so crucial in the urban area that you would forget the sole version of your book on a train, which is not that unlike leaving your infant on a transport? Undoubtedly an rendezvous, but what sort?

Cooper was prone to amp up her own messiness and haplessness