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Jilly Cooper, who died suddenly at the age of 88, sold 11m copies of her many sweeping books over her half-century writing career. Adored by every sensible person over a specific age (forty-five), she was brought to a younger audience last year with the Disney+ adaptation of Rivals.

The Rutshire Chronicles

Cooper purists would have wanted to see the Rutshire chronicles in order: commencing with Riders, originally published in 1985, in which Rupert Campbell-Black, cad, philanderer, equestrian, is debuts. But that’s a sidebar – what was striking about seeing Rivals as a box set was how well Cooper’s universe had stood the test of time. The chronicles captured the 1980s: 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 snipped about how room-temperature their bubbly was; the gender dynamics, with harassment and assault so commonplace they were practically figures in their own right, a double act you could rely on to drive the narrative forward.

While Cooper might have inhabited this period totally, she was never the proverbial fish not perceiving the ocean because it’s ubiquitous. She had a humanity and an perceptive wisdom that you could easily miss from her public persona. Every character, from the dog to the horse to her mother and father to her international student's relative, was always “utterly charming” – unless, that is, they were “completely exquisite”. People got harassed and more in Cooper’s work, but that was never acceptable – it’s remarkable how acceptable it is in many supposedly sophisticated books of the period.

Class and Character

She was affluent middle-class, which for all intents and purposes meant that her dad had to work for a living, but she’d have defined the classes more by their mores. The middle classes worried about all things, all the time – what society might think, mostly – and the upper classes didn’t give a … well “nonsense”. She was raunchy, at times very much, but her language was always refined.

She’d describe her childhood in idyllic language: “Daddy went to battle and Mother was deeply concerned”. They were both utterly beautiful, engaged in a lifelong love match, and this Cooper emulated in her own union, to a editor of military histories, Leo Cooper. She was in her mid-twenties, he was twenty-seven, the union wasn’t perfect (he was a unfaithful type), but she was always confident giving people the secret for a successful union, which is creaking bed springs but (big reveal), they’re squeaking with all the joy. He avoided reading her books – he read Prudence once, when he had flu, and said it made him feel more ill. She took no offense, and said it was reciprocated: she wouldn’t be caught reading military history.

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

The Romance Series

Prudence (1978) was the fifth installment in the Romance novels, which commenced with Emily in the mid-70s. If you discovered Cooper from the later works, having begun in Rutshire, the early novels, AKA “the books named after upper-class women” – also Octavia and Harriet – were near misses, every male lead feeling like a trial version for Rupert, every female lead a little bit drippy. Plus, line for line (Without exact data), there was less sex in them. They were a bit reserved on topics of decorum, women always being anxious that men would think they’re promiscuous, men saying batshit things about why they liked virgins (similarly, seemingly, as a genuine guy always wants to be the first to open a container of Nescafé). I don’t know if I’d recommend reading these books at a formative age. I thought for a while that that’s what the upper class actually believed.

They were, however, incredibly well-crafted, effective romances, which is much harder than it seems. You experienced Harriet’s unplanned pregnancy, Bella’s pissy in-laws, Emily’s Scottish isolation – Cooper could guide you from an hopeless moment to a jackpot of the soul, and you could not once, even in the initial stages, identify how she managed it. At one moment you’d be chuckling at her incredibly close descriptions of the bedding, the next you’d have tears in your eyes and no idea how they arrived.

Literary Guidance

Inquired how to be a author, Cooper used to say the type of guidance that the famous author would have said, if he could have been arsed to guide a aspiring writer: use all 5 of your senses, say how things smelled and looked and audible and felt and palatable – it greatly improves the narrative. But likely more helpful was: “Always keep a notebook – it’s very challenging, when you’re 25, to recall what being 24 felt like.” That’s one of the first things you observe, in the more extensive, densely peopled books, which have 17 heroines rather than just one lead, all with decidedly aristocratic names, unless they’re Stateside, in which case they’re called Helen. Even an years apart of several years, between two siblings, between a gentleman and a lady, you can perceive in the speech.

An Author's Tale

The historical account of Riders was so exactly characteristically Cooper it might not have been accurate, except it definitely is real because a major newspaper made a public request about it at the time: she completed the whole manuscript in the early 70s, long before the Romances, took it into the downtown and misplaced it on a public transport. Some detail has been intentionally omitted of this story – what, for case, was so crucial in the urban area that you would leave the sole version of your manuscript on a bus, which is not that unlike abandoning your infant on a transport? Certainly an assignation, but what kind?

Cooper was wont to amp up her own messiness and ineptitude