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The celebrated author Jilly Cooper, who died suddenly at the 88 years of age, racked up sales of 11 million copies of her assorted sweeping books over her 50-year literary career. Adored by all discerning readers over a certain age (forty-five), she was brought to a younger audience last year with the streaming series adaptation of Rivals.

The Rutshire Chronicles

Cooper purists would have liked to view the Rutshire chronicles in chronological order: commencing with Riders, first published in 1985, in which the infamous Rupert Campbell-Black, rogue, charmer, rider, is first introduced. But that’s a sidebar – what was striking about seeing Rivals as a box set was how well Cooper’s world had remained relevant. The chronicles captured the eighties: the power dressing and voluminous skirts; the preoccupation with social class; aristocrats disdaining the ostentatious newly wealthy, both overlooking everyone else while they snipped about how warm their sparkling wine was; the intimate power struggles, with inappropriate behavior and assault so everyday they were virtually characters in their own right, a duo you could trust to drive the narrative forward.

While Cooper might have lived in this period fully, she was never the typical fish not perceiving the ocean because it’s ubiquitous. She had a humanity and an observational intelligence that you maybe wouldn’t guess from her public persona. Everyone, from the dog to the equine to her parents to her foreign exchange sibling, was always “absolutely sweet” – unless, that is, they were “completely exquisite”. People got harassed and worse in Cooper’s work, but that was never acceptable – it’s astonishing how tolerated it is in many supposedly sophisticated books of the time.

Background and Behavior

She was upper-middle-class, which for all intents and purposes meant that her dad had to earn an income, but she’d have defined the classes more by their mores. The middle-class people fretted about all things, all the time – what society might think, mainly – and the aristocracy didn’t give a … well “stuff”. She was risqué, at times extremely, but her language was never vulgar.

She’d narrate her family life in storybook prose: “Father went to the war and Mom was extremely anxious”. They were both absolutely stunning, participating in a lifelong love match, and this Cooper mirrored in her own union, to a publisher of military histories, Leo Cooper. She was twenty-four, he was 27, the marriage wasn’t smooth sailing (he was a philanderer), but she was never less than at ease giving people the secret for a happy marriage, which is creaking bed springs but (crucial point), they’re creaking with all the mirth. He never read her books – he tried Prudence once, when he had influenza, and said it made him feel unwell. She didn’t mind, and said it was reciprocated: she wouldn’t be seen dead reading war chronicles.

Always keep a diary – it’s very challenging, when you’re 25, to recollect what age 24 felt like

The Romance Series

Prudence (1978) was the fifth installment in the Romance novels, which started with Emily in 1975. If you discovered Cooper in reverse, having begun in the main series, the initial books, also known as “the books named after upper-class women” – also Bella and Harriet – were close but no cigar, every hero feeling like a prototype for Campbell-Black, every female lead a little bit weak. Plus, line for line (I haven’t actually run the numbers), there wasn't the same quantity of sex in them. They were a bit reserved on topics of decorum, women always fretting that men would think they’re immoral, men saying outrageous statements about why they favored virgins (comparably, seemingly, as a true gentleman always wants to be the primary to unseal a tin of coffee). I don’t know if I’d recommend reading these novels at a young age. I believed for a while that that is what posh people actually believed.

They were, however, extremely tightly written, effective romances, which is much harder than it appears. You felt Harriet’s unwanted pregnancy, Bella’s annoying family-by-marriage, Emily’s Scottish isolation – Cooper could transport you from an all-is-lost moment to a jackpot of the soul, and you could not once, even in the early days, identify how she achieved it. One minute you’d be smiling at her incredibly close descriptions of the bedding, the subsequently you’d have tears in your eyes and no idea how they got there.

Writing Wisdom

Questioned how to be a author, Cooper used to say the sort of advice that the famous author would have said, if he could have been arsed to help out a aspiring writer: use all all of your senses, say how things aromatic and appeared and sounded and touched and flavored – it greatly improves the prose. But perhaps more practical was: “Constantly keep a notebook – it’s very difficult, when you’re 25, to remember what age 24 felt like.” That’s one of the first things 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 Stateside, in which case they’re called a common name. Even an years apart of four years, between two sisters, between a male and a woman, you can detect in the speech.

A Literary Mystery

The backstory of Riders was so pitch-perfectly Jilly Cooper it can’t possibly have been real, except it absolutely is true because a London paper made a public request about it at the time: she completed the complete book in 1970, prior to the first books, carried it into the downtown and left it on a vehicle. Some detail has been deliberately left out 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 bus, which is not that unlike abandoning your baby on a transport? Surely an rendezvous, but what kind?

Cooper was prone to exaggerate her own disorder and ineptitude