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Jilly Cooper, who passed away unexpectedly at the 88 years of age, racked up sales of 11m copies of her various sweeping books over her 50-year writing career. Adored by anyone with any sense over a specific age (forty-five), she was presented to a younger audience last year with the Disney+ adaptation of Rivals.

The Beloved Series

Longtime readers would have preferred to view the Rutshire chronicles in sequence: beginning with Riders, initially released in 1985, in which the infamous Rupert Campbell-Black, rogue, charmer, horse rider, is first introduced. But that’s a sidebar – what was striking about watching Rivals as a complete series was how effectively Cooper’s world had stood the test of time. The chronicles captured the 80s: the broad shoulders and voluminous skirts; the fixation on status; aristocrats disdaining the Technicolored nouveau riche, both ignoring everyone else while they quibbled about how room-temperature their bubbly was; the sexual politics, with harassment and abuse so routine they were practically characters in their own right, a pair you could trust to drive the narrative forward.

While Cooper might have inhabited this era fully, she was never the classic fish not perceiving the ocean because it’s everywhere. She had a compassion and an perceptive wisdom that you might not expect from listening to her speak. All her creations, from the canine to the pony to her parents to her French exchange’s brother, was always “utterly charming” – unless, that is, they were “completely exquisite”. People got harassed and more in Cooper’s work, but that was never condoned – it’s surprising how tolerated it is in many more highbrow books of the period.

Background and Behavior

She was affluent middle-class, which for real-world terms meant that her dad had to hold down a job, but she’d have defined the classes more by their values. The middle classes fretted about everything, all the time – what others might think, primarily – and the aristocracy didn’t bother with “stuff”. She was spicy, at times very much, but her language was always refined.

She’d describe her upbringing in idyllic language: “Daddy went to Dunkirk and Mother was extremely anxious”. They were both completely gorgeous, involved in a eternal partnership, and this Cooper replicated in her own marriage, to a businessman of historical accounts, Leo Cooper. She was 24, he was 27, the union wasn’t perfect (he was a philanderer), but she was consistently comfortable giving people the formula for a successful union, which is noisy mattress but (crucial point), they’re creaking with all the mirth. He didn't read her books – he picked up Prudence once, when he had a cold, and said it made him feel unwell. She took no offense, and said it was returned: she wouldn’t be seen dead reading military history.

Constantly keep a diary – it’s very challenging, when you’re 25, to recollect what twenty-four felt like

Initial Novels

Prudence (1978) was the fifth installment in the Romance collection, which started with Emily in 1975. If you came to Cooper in reverse, having begun in the main series, the early novels, also known as “the novels named after affluent ladies” – also Octavia and Harriet – were close but no cigar, every hero feeling like a test-run for Campbell-Black, every heroine a little bit drippy. Plus, page for page (I can't verify statistically), there wasn’t as much sex in them. They were a bit uptight on issues of propriety, women always worrying that men would think they’re promiscuous, men saying outrageous statements about why they preferred virgins (in much the same way, seemingly, as a true gentleman always wants to be the initial to break a tin of instant coffee). I don’t know if I’d suggest reading these stories at a formative age. I believed for a while that that is what posh people genuinely felt.

They were, however, extremely well-crafted, successful romances, which is considerably tougher than it appears. You experienced Harriet’s surprise baby, Bella’s annoying in-laws, Emily’s Scottish isolation – Cooper could guide you from an desperate moment to a windfall of the emotions, and you could never, even in the initial stages, identify how she did it. One minute you’d be laughing at her highly specific accounts of the sheets, the next you’d have emotional response and little understanding how they appeared.

Authorial Advice

Asked how to be a author, Cooper frequently advised the type of guidance that the famous author would have said, if he could have been bothered to assist a beginner: employ all 5 of your senses, say how things aromatic and looked and heard and touched and tasted – it greatly improves the writing. But likely more helpful was: “Constantly keep a journal – it’s very difficult, when you’re twenty-five, to recollect what twenty-four felt like.” That’s one of the initial observations you observe, in the more detailed, character-rich books, which have numerous female leads rather than just a single protagonist, all with decidedly aristocratic names, unless they’re American, in which case they’re called Helen. Even an age difference of several years, between two siblings, between a male and a woman, you can hear in the conversation.

The Lost Manuscript

The backstory of Riders was so pitch-perfectly Jilly Cooper it couldn't possibly have been true, except it absolutely is real because a major newspaper published a notice about it at the time: she wrote the complete book in 1970, long before the Romances, carried it into the city center and left it on a vehicle. Some context has been intentionally omitted of this anecdote – what, for instance, was so important in the city that you would leave the sole version of your novel on a train, which is not that far from leaving your infant on a train? Certainly an rendezvous, but which type?

Cooper was prone to exaggerate her own messiness and ineptitude