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The beloved novelist Jilly Cooper, who left us unexpectedly at the 88 years of age, achieved sales of eleven million copies of her assorted epic books over her five-decade literary career. Cherished by all discerning readers over a specific age (forty-five), she was introduced to a younger audience last year with the Disney+ adaptation of Rivals.

The Beloved Series

Devoted fans would have preferred to watch the Rutshire chronicles in order: starting with Riders, initially released in 1985, in which Rupert Campbell-Black, rogue, charmer, rider, is initially presented. But that’s a sidebar – what was striking about seeing Rivals as a complete series was how brilliantly Cooper’s fictional realm had aged. The chronicles encapsulated the 80s: the power dressing and puffball skirts; the obsession with class; aristocrats sneering at the flashy new money, both overlooking everyone else while they quibbled about how lukewarm their champagne was; the intimate power struggles, with unwanted advances and abuse so routine they were virtually personas in their own right, a duo you could trust to move the plot along.

While Cooper might have occupied this age completely, she was never the typical fish not seeing the ocean because it’s all around. She had a empathy and an perceptive wisdom that you might not expect from her public persona. All her creations, from the pet to the horse to her mother and father to her French exchange’s brother, was always “utterly charming” – unless, that is, they were “absolutely divine”. People got harassed 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 period.

Class and Character

She was well-to-do, which for all intents and purposes meant that her father had to work for a living, but she’d have described the social classes more by their customs. The middle classes worried about everything, all the time – what others might think, mainly – and the elite didn’t care a … well “such things”. She was raunchy, at times extremely, but her dialogue was always refined.

She’d describe her childhood in fairytale terms: “Father went to Dunkirk and Mom was terribly, terribly worried”. They were both completely gorgeous, involved in a eternal partnership, and this Cooper mirrored in her own partnership, to a businessman of historical accounts, Leo Cooper. She was 24, he was in his late twenties, the marriage wasn’t smooth sailing (he was a bit of a shagger), but she was always comfortable giving people the secret for a successful union, which is noisy mattress but (crucial point), they’re creaking with all the joy. He never read her books – he read Prudence once, when he had influenza, and said it made him feel more ill. She wasn't bothered, and said it was returned: she wouldn’t be spotted reading military history.

Always keep a journal – it’s very difficult, when you’re mid-twenties, to remember what age 24 felt like

Initial Novels

Prudence (1978) was the fifth book in the Romance series, which started with Emily in 1975. If you discovered Cooper in reverse, having begun in Rutshire, the Romances, AKA “those ones named after affluent ladies” – also Bella and Harriet – were close but no cigar, every male lead feeling like a prototype for Rupert, every heroine a little bit weak. Plus, line for line (I haven’t actually run the numbers), there wasn’t as much sex in them. They were a bit uptight on topics of modesty, women always being anxious that men would think they’re immoral, men saying batshit things about why they preferred virgins (similarly, seemingly, as a real man always wants to be the primary to break a jar of instant coffee). I don’t know if I’d recommend reading these novels at a formative age. I assumed for a while that that is what posh people genuinely felt.

They were, however, incredibly precisely constructed, successful romances, which is much harder than it seems. You felt Harriet’s unplanned pregnancy, Bella’s difficult relatives, Emily’s loneliness in Scotland – Cooper could transport you from an hopeless moment to a windfall of the heart, and you could not once, even in the beginning, pinpoint how she achieved it. One minute you’d be laughing at her incredibly close descriptions of the bed linen, the subsequently you’d have watery eyes and uncertainty how they got there.

Literary Guidance

Questioned how to be a writer, Cooper frequently advised the kind of thing that the literary giant would have said, if he could have been arsed to help out a beginner: employ all all of your faculties, say how things scented and looked and heard and touched and flavored – it really lifts the narrative. But probably more useful was: “Forever keep a diary – it’s very hard, when you’re twenty-five, to recollect what being 24 felt like.” That’s one of the first things you observe, in the longer, densely peopled books, which have 17 heroines rather than just a single protagonist, all with extremely posh names, unless they’re American, in which case they’re called a simple moniker. Even an generational gap of a few years, between two siblings, between a male and a woman, you can detect in the dialogue.

The Lost Manuscript

The historical account of Riders was so perfectly typical of the author it couldn't possibly have been true, except it certainly was factual because a major newspaper made a public request about it at the time: she completed the entire draft in 1970, prior to the first books, brought it into the downtown and left it on a public transport. Some detail has been deliberately left out of this tale – what, for example, was so significant in the West End that you would forget the only copy of your novel on a bus, which is not that far from forgetting your infant on a train? Certainly an rendezvous, but which type?

Cooper was wont to embellish her own chaos and ineptitude