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The celebrated author Jilly Cooper, who died suddenly at the age of 88, racked up sales of eleven million books of her various epic books over her 50-year literary career. Beloved by all discerning readers over a certain age (mid-forties), she was brought to a modern audience last year with the streaming series adaptation of Rivals.

The Beloved Series

Longtime readers would have preferred to see the Rutshire chronicles in chronological order: commencing with Riders, initially released in 1985, in which Rupert Campbell-Black, scoundrel, charmer, equestrian, is debuts. But that’s a sidebar – what was striking about seeing 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 preoccupation with social class; the upper class sneering at the ostentatious newly wealthy, both overlooking everyone else while they complained about how room-temperature their champagne was; the gender dynamics, with unwanted advances and assault so commonplace they were virtually characters in their own right, a pair you could rely on to move the plot along.

While Cooper might have occupied this period totally, she was never the classic fish not seeing the ocean because it’s everywhere. She had a humanity and an perceptive wisdom that you could easily miss from listening to her speak. Everyone, from the pet to the equine to her family to her foreign exchange sibling, was always “absolutely sweet” – unless, that is, they were “completely exquisite”. 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 era.

Social Strata and Personality

She was upper-middle-class, which for real-world terms meant that her parent had to hold down a job, but she’d have characterized the classes more by their customs. The middle classes anxiously contemplated about every little detail, all the time – what other people might think, mainly – and the aristocracy didn’t bother with “such things”. She was spicy, at times very much, but her prose was always refined.

She’d recount her childhood in idyllic language: “Daddy went to the war and Mummy was extremely anxious”. They were both absolutely stunning, engaged in a lifelong love match, and this Cooper mirrored in her own partnership, to a businessman of war books, Leo Cooper. She was 24, he was 27, the marriage wasn’t smooth sailing (he was a bit of a shagger), but she was always at ease giving people the recipe for a happy marriage, which is creaking bed springs but (key insight), they’re squeaking with all the mirth. He never read her books – he read Prudence once, when he had flu, and said it made him feel more ill. She didn’t mind, and said it was returned: she wouldn’t be seen dead reading war chronicles.

Always keep a journal – it’s very challenging, when you’re mid-twenties, to recollect what being 24 felt like

Early Works

Prudence (1978) was the fifth book in the Romance collection, which started with Emily in 1975. If you approached Cooper backwards, having started in Rutshire, the early novels, AKA “those ones named after upper-class women” – also Bella and Harriet – were close but no cigar, every hero feeling like a trial version for Rupert, every female lead a little bit drippy. Plus, chapter for chapter (I can't verify statistically), there wasn't the same quantity of sex in them. They were a bit uptight on matters of propriety, women always being anxious that men would think they’re loose, men saying ridiculous comments about why they favored virgins (similarly, apparently, as a real man always wants to be the first to unseal a jar of instant coffee). I don’t know if I’d advise reading these books at a young age. I assumed for a while that that is what posh people really thought.

They were, however, extremely well-crafted, high-functioning romances, which is far more difficult than it appears. You experienced Harriet’s unplanned pregnancy, Bella’s pissy relatives, Emily’s remote Scottish life – Cooper could take you from an hopeless moment to a windfall of the soul, and you could not once, even in the early days, identify how she achieved it. One minute you’d be laughing at her highly specific descriptions of the bedding, the subsequently you’d have watery eyes and no idea how they appeared.

Writing Wisdom

Questioned how to be a novelist, Cooper used to say the type of guidance that the famous author would have said, if he could have been arsed to guide a novice: utilize all 5 of your faculties, say how things aromatic and looked and heard and felt and flavored – it really lifts the writing. But perhaps more practical was: “Forever keep a notebook – it’s very hard, when you’re twenty-five, to remember what age 24 felt like.” That’s one of the first things you detect, in the more extensive, more populated books, which have numerous female leads rather than just one, all with decidedly aristocratic names, unless they’re American, in which case they’re called a simple moniker. Even an age difference of a few years, between two relatives, between a man and a lady, you can perceive in the speech.

The Lost Manuscript

The origin story of Riders was so perfectly typical of the author it might not have been real, except it absolutely is real because a major newspaper published a notice about it at the time: she finished the whole manuscript in the early 70s, well before the early novels, took it into the West End and left it on a public transport. Some detail has been deliberately left out of this anecdote – what, for case, was so significant in the West End that you would abandon the unique draft of your manuscript on a bus, which is not that unlike leaving your infant on a railway? Certainly an assignation, but what kind?

Cooper was wont to embellish her own disorder and haplessness