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The beloved novelist Jilly Cooper, who passed away unexpectedly at the 88 years old, racked up sales of 11m volumes of her many sweeping books over her 50-year literary career. Cherished by every sensible person over a particular age (mid-forties), she was brought to a new generation last year with the streaming series adaptation of Rivals.

The Beloved Series

Devoted fans would have wanted to watch the Rutshire chronicles in chronological order: commencing with Riders, first published in 1985, in which the character Rupert Campbell-Black, rogue, charmer, horse rider, is initially presented. But that’s a side note – what was remarkable about viewing Rivals as a box set was how brilliantly Cooper’s universe had stood the test of time. The chronicles captured the 1980s: the power dressing and puffball skirts; the fixation on status; the upper class disdaining the Technicolored nouveau riche, both overlooking everyone else while they snipped about how warm their sparkling wine was; the gender dynamics, with unwanted advances and abuse so routine they were virtually personas in their own right, a pair you could trust to move the plot along.

While Cooper might have inhabited this era completely, she was never the typical fish not seeing the ocean because it’s everywhere. She had a compassion and an keen insight that you maybe wouldn’t guess from hearing her talk. Everyone, from the dog to the equine to her family to her international student's relative, was always “absolutely sweet” – unless, that is, they were “completely exquisite”. People got groped and worse in Cooper’s work, but that was never acceptable – it’s remarkable how acceptable it is in many more highbrow books of the period.

Background and Behavior

She was upper-middle-class, which for practical purposes meant that her father had to work for a living, but she’d have defined the social classes more by their values. The bourgeoisie worried about everything, all the time – what other people might think, mainly – and the aristocracy didn’t give a … well “stuff”. She was risqué, at times incredibly so, but her dialogue was always refined.

She’d narrate her childhood in idyllic language: “Father went to the war and Mom was deeply concerned”. They were both absolutely stunning, engaged in a eternal partnership, and this Cooper mirrored in her own marriage, to a publisher of military histories, Leo Cooper. She was twenty-four, he was 27, the relationship wasn’t smooth sailing (he was a philanderer), but she was consistently confident giving people the recipe for a happy marriage, which is squeaky bed but (key insight), they’re noisy with all the laughter. He avoided reading her books – he picked up Prudence once, when he had influenza, and said it made him feel unwell. She wasn't bothered, and said it was returned: she wouldn’t be seen dead reading battle accounts.

Constantly keep a journal – it’s very hard, when you’re twenty-five, to remember what age 24 felt like

The Romance Series

Prudence (1978) was the fifth installment in the Romance series, which started with Emily in 1975. If you discovered Cooper backwards, having commenced in the main series, the early novels, AKA “the books named after affluent ladies” – also Octavia and Harriet – were near misses, every male lead feeling like a test-run for the iconic character, every main character a little bit drippy. Plus, chapter for chapter (I haven’t actually run the numbers), there was less sex in them. They were a bit uptight on matters of decorum, women always worrying that men would think they’re immoral, men saying batshit things about why they favored virgins (similarly, seemingly, as a genuine guy always wants to be the first to break a jar of instant coffee). I don’t know if I’d suggest reading these stories at a impressionable age. I thought for a while that that’s what posh people actually believed.

They were, however, extremely precisely constructed, successful romances, which is far more difficult than it appears. You experienced Harriet’s unplanned pregnancy, Bella’s difficult family-by-marriage, Emily’s remote Scottish life – Cooper could transport you from an hopeless moment to a windfall of the heart, and you could not once, even in the early days, pinpoint how she achieved it. Suddenly you’d be laughing at her incredibly close depictions of the bedding, the subsequently you’d have emotional response and uncertainty how they got there.

Authorial Advice

Questioned how to be a author, Cooper frequently advised the type of guidance that the literary giant would have said, if he could have been inclined to assist a aspiring writer: employ all all of your faculties, say how things smelled and appeared and sounded and tactile and tasted – it greatly improves the narrative. But perhaps more practical was: “Forever keep a notebook – it’s very hard, when you’re 25, to recall what twenty-four felt like.” That’s one of the first things you observe, in the more extensive, character-rich books, which have seventeen main characters rather than just one, all with extremely posh names, unless they’re Stateside, in which case they’re called Helen. Even an age difference of several years, between two sisters, between a gentleman and a lady, you can perceive in the conversation.

An Author's Tale

The backstory of Riders was so perfectly characteristically Cooper it might not have been real, except it certainly was real because a London paper made a public request about it at the time: she wrote the whole manuscript in the early 70s, long before the first books, brought it into the downtown and forgot it on a public transport. Some context has been purposely excluded of this story – what, for case, was so significant in the city that you would forget the unique draft of your book on a train, which is not that far from leaving your child on a railway? Undoubtedly an meeting, but what sort?

Cooper was wont to exaggerate her own messiness and clumsiness