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The beloved novelist Jilly Cooper, who left us unexpectedly at the 88 years old, sold 11m volumes of her various grand books over her 50-year literary career. Cherished by all discerning readers over a certain age (45), she was brought to a younger audience last year with the TV adaptation of Rivals.

The Rutshire Chronicles

Devoted fans would have liked to see the Rutshire chronicles in chronological order: starting with Riders, originally published in 1985, in which the character Rupert Campbell-Black, scoundrel, charmer, rider, is first introduced. But that’s a side note – what was striking about seeing Rivals as a box set was how effectively Cooper’s fictional realm had stood the test of time. The chronicles encapsulated the 80s: the power dressing and voluminous skirts; the preoccupation with social class; nobility looking down on the flashy new money, both ignoring everyone else while they complained about how room-temperature their champagne was; the intimate power struggles, with inappropriate behavior and abuse so everyday they were practically figures in their own right, a duo you could trust to move the plot along.

While Cooper might have occupied this period totally, she was never the proverbial fish not perceiving the ocean because it’s everywhere. She had a humanity and an observational intelligence that you maybe wouldn’t guess from listening to her speak. Every character, from the dog to the horse to her parents to her foreign exchange sibling, was always “completely delightful” – unless, that is, they were “truly heavenly”. People got assaulted and more in Cooper’s work, but that was never acceptable – it’s astonishing how OK it is in many far more literary books of the time.

Background and Behavior

She was well-to-do, which for real-world terms meant that her father had to earn an income, but she’d have defined the social classes more by their values. The middle-class people worried about all things, all the time – what other people might think, primarily – and the elite didn’t care a … well “stuff”. She was raunchy, at times very much, but her dialogue was always refined.

She’d describe her childhood in idyllic language: “Father went to the war and Mother was extremely anxious”. They were both absolutely stunning, involved in a lifelong love match, and this Cooper replicated in her own union, to a editor of war books, Leo Cooper. She was twenty-four, he was in his late twenties, the union wasn’t smooth sailing (he was a unfaithful type), but she was never less than confident giving people the formula for a blissful partnership, which is creaking bed springs but (crucial point), they’re noisy with all the mirth. He never read her books – he picked up Prudence once, when he had flu, and said it made him feel worse. She took no offense, and said it was returned: she wouldn’t be spotted reading battle accounts.

Always keep a notebook – it’s very difficult, when you’re twenty-five, to recollect what age 24 felt like

Initial Novels

Prudence (the late 70s) was the fifth installment in the Romance series, which began with Emily in 1975. If you approached Cooper in reverse, having started in the main series, the initial books, alternatively called “those ones named after posh girls” – also Imogen and Harriet – were close but no cigar, every male lead feeling like a test-run for Rupert, every heroine a little bit insipid. Plus, line for line (I haven’t actually run the numbers), there was less sex in them. They were a bit conservative on matters of propriety, women always worrying that men would think they’re loose, men saying ridiculous comments about why they favored virgins (comparably, apparently, as a genuine guy always wants to be the initial to break a container of Nescafé). I don’t know if I’d suggest reading these novels at a formative age. I assumed for a while that that was what posh people genuinely felt.

They were, however, incredibly precisely constructed, high-functioning romances, which is considerably tougher than it sounds. You lived Harriet’s surprise baby, Bella’s difficult in-laws, Emily’s loneliness in Scotland – Cooper could take you from an desperate moment to a lottery win of the soul, and you could not ever, even in the early days, identify how she managed it. One minute you’d be laughing at her meticulously detailed descriptions of the bedding, the subsequently you’d have tears in your eyes and little understanding how they got there.

Authorial Advice

Inquired 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 arsed to help out a aspiring writer: utilize all 5 of your senses, say how things aromatic and appeared and audible and touched and palatable – it significantly enhances the writing. But probably more useful was: “Forever keep a journal – it’s very difficult, when you’re mid-twenties, to remember what age 24 felt like.” That’s one of the initial observations you observe, in the more detailed, character-rich books, which have 17 heroines rather than just one lead, all with extremely posh names, unless they’re Stateside, in which case they’re called a common name. Even an years apart of four years, between two relatives, between a male and a female, you can hear in the dialogue.

A Literary Mystery

The backstory of Riders was so perfectly Jilly Cooper it couldn't possibly have been real, except it definitely is real because a London paper published a notice about it at the period: she finished the entire draft in the early 70s, prior to the Romances, brought it into the downtown and forgot it on a bus. Some context has been purposely excluded of this anecdote – what, for example, was so important in the West End that you would leave the only copy of your novel on a public transport, which is not that unlike abandoning your child on a train? Certainly an rendezvous, but which type?

Cooper was prone to embellish her own chaos and ineptitude