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The beloved novelist Jilly Cooper, who passed away unexpectedly at the 88 years old, achieved sales of eleven million copies of her many grand books over her five-decade career in writing. Beloved by every sensible person over a specific age (mid-forties), she was brought to a new generation last year with the Disney+ adaptation of Rivals.

The Beloved Series

Cooper purists would have wanted to view the Rutshire chronicles in chronological order: starting with Riders, originally published in 1985, in which Rupert Campbell-Black, cad, philanderer, rider, is debuts. But that’s a side note – what was remarkable about viewing Rivals as a complete series was how brilliantly Cooper’s world had aged. The chronicles encapsulated the eighties: the power dressing and voluminous skirts; the obsession with class; the upper class looking down on the ostentatious newly wealthy, both ignoring everyone else while they quibbled about how room-temperature their bubbly was; the sexual politics, with inappropriate behavior and misconduct so routine they were virtually characters in their own right, a double act you could trust to advance the story.

While Cooper might have lived in this age completely, she was never the typical fish not noticing the ocean because it’s everywhere. She had a empathy and an perceptive wisdom that you could easily miss from hearing her talk. All her creations, from the pet to the equine to her mother and father to her French exchange’s brother, was always “absolutely sweet” – unless, that is, they were “completely exquisite”. People got groped and further in Cooper’s work, but that was never OK – it’s surprising how acceptable it is in many supposedly sophisticated books of the time.

Social Strata and Personality

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 social classes more by their customs. The middle-class people anxiously contemplated about all things, all the time – what other people might think, mostly – and the elite didn’t bother with “such things”. She was risqué, at times extremely, but her dialogue was never coarse.

She’d narrate her family life in fairytale terms: “Daddy went to Dunkirk and Mummy was extremely anxious”. They were both absolutely stunning, engaged in a lifelong love match, and this Cooper emulated in her own union, to a publisher of military histories, Leo Cooper. She was in her mid-twenties, he was in his late twenties, the relationship wasn’t without hiccups (he was a unfaithful type), but she was always comfortable giving people the secret for a successful union, which is squeaky bed but (big reveal), they’re creaking with all the joy. He avoided reading her books – he picked up Prudence once, when he had influenza, and said it made him feel worse. She wasn't bothered, and said it was mutual: she wouldn’t be caught reading military history.

Constantly keep a notebook – it’s very hard, when you’re twenty-five, to recollect what twenty-four felt like

The Romance Series

Prudence (the late 70s) was the fifth installment in the Romance series, which began with Emily in 1975. If you came to Cooper backwards, having started in her later universe, the initial books, also known as “those ones named after posh girls” – also Imogen and Harriet – were close but no cigar, every male lead feeling like a prototype for Rupert, every heroine a little bit weak. Plus, page for page (I haven’t actually run the numbers), there wasn’t as much sex in them. They were a bit uptight on topics of propriety, women always fretting that men would think they’re immoral, men saying batshit things about why they favored virgins (similarly, apparently, as a true gentleman always wants to be the initial to break a container of Nescafé). I don’t know if I’d recommend reading these novels at a young age. I believed for a while that that was what posh people actually believed.

They were, however, extremely well-crafted, effective romances, which is far more difficult than it sounds. You lived Harriet’s unwanted pregnancy, Bella’s difficult family-by-marriage, Emily’s remote Scottish life – Cooper could transport you from an desperate moment to a windfall of the emotions, and you could not ever, even in the initial stages, identify how she achieved it. One minute you’d be smiling at her incredibly close depictions of the sheets, the next you’d have tears in your eyes and no idea how they arrived.

Writing Wisdom

Questioned how to be a novelist, Cooper used to say the type of guidance that the famous author would have said, if he could have been bothered to help out a beginner: utilize all five of your senses, say how things smelled and looked and audible and felt and palatable – it significantly enhances the prose. But perhaps more practical was: “Constantly keep a diary – it’s very hard, when you’re twenty-five, to recollect what age 24 felt like.” That’s one of the first things you detect, in the more extensive, densely peopled books, which have seventeen main characters rather than just a single protagonist, all with very upper-class names, unless they’re American, in which case they’re called Helen. Even an years apart of several years, between two siblings, between a male and a female, you can hear in the conversation.

An Author's Tale

The backstory of Riders was so exactly typical of the author it can’t possibly have been real, except it certainly was factual because a major newspaper made a public request about it at the era: she wrote the whole manuscript in the early 70s, long before the early novels, carried it into the West End and left it on a bus. Some texture has been deliberately left out of this tale – what, for example, was so crucial in the West End that you would abandon the only copy of your novel on a public transport, which is not that unlike abandoning your baby on a transport? Undoubtedly an assignation, but what kind?

Cooper was prone to amp up her own messiness and clumsiness