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The celebrated author Jilly Cooper, who died suddenly at the age of 88, racked up sales of 11 million volumes of her assorted grand books over her five-decade writing career. Adored by every sensible person over a certain age (forty-five), she was introduced to a modern audience last year with the Disney+ adaptation of Rivals.

The Beloved Series

Cooper purists would have wanted to view the Rutshire chronicles in order: starting with Riders, first published in 1985, in which the infamous Rupert Campbell-Black, cad, heartbreaker, rider, is initially presented. But that’s a minor point – what was remarkable about viewing Rivals as a complete series was how effectively Cooper’s fictional realm had aged. The chronicles distilled the eighties: the power dressing and puffball skirts; the preoccupation with social class; the upper class looking down on the Technicolored nouveau riche, both dismissing everyone else while they quibbled about how lukewarm their champagne was; the intimate power struggles, with unwanted advances and assault so routine they were almost personas in their own right, a double act you could rely on to move the plot along.

While Cooper might have occupied this period fully, 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 her public persona. All her creations, from the dog to the horse to her parents to her French exchange’s brother, was always “absolutely sweet” – unless, that is, they were “truly heavenly”. People got harassed and worse in Cooper’s work, but that was never acceptable – it’s surprising how OK it is in many far more literary books of the era.

Class and Character

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

She’d describe her upbringing in storybook prose: “Daddy went to battle and Mummy was terribly, terribly worried”. They were both completely gorgeous, involved in a eternal partnership, and this Cooper replicated in her own partnership, to a businessman of war books, Leo Cooper. She was twenty-four, he was in his late twenties, the union wasn’t without hiccups (he was a unfaithful type), but she was never less than confident giving people the formula for a successful union, which is noisy mattress but (crucial point), they’re noisy with all the mirth. He never read her books – he tried 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 battle accounts.

Forever keep a journal – it’s very hard, when you’re 25, to recall what age 24 felt like

Early Works

Prudence (1978) was the fifth book in the Romance collection, which commenced with Emily in 1975. If you came to Cooper in reverse, having begun in Rutshire, the Romances, AKA “those ones named after posh girls” – also Bella and Harriet – were near misses, every protagonist feeling like a prototype for Campbell-Black, every heroine a little bit drippy. Plus, page for page (I haven’t actually run the numbers), there wasn't the same quantity of sex in them. They were a bit reserved on matters of decorum, women always being anxious that men would think they’re loose, men saying ridiculous comments about why they liked virgins (similarly, ostensibly, as a true gentleman always wants to be the first to unseal a tin of instant coffee). I don’t know if I’d recommend reading these books at a young age. I assumed for a while that that’s what the upper class really thought.

They were, however, remarkably well-crafted, high-functioning romances, which is considerably tougher than it sounds. You experienced Harriet’s unwanted pregnancy, Bella’s annoying family-by-marriage, Emily’s Scottish isolation – Cooper could guide you from an all-is-lost moment to a windfall of the heart, and you could not once, even in the early days, pinpoint how she achieved it. One minute you’d be chuckling at her meticulously detailed depictions of the bed linen, the next you’d have watery eyes and little understanding how they got there.

Authorial Advice

Inquired how to be a author, Cooper would often state the kind of thing that the literary giant would have said, if he could have been arsed to assist a aspiring writer: use all five of your faculties, say how things smelled and appeared and heard and tactile and palatable – it significantly enhances the narrative. But probably more useful was: “Constantly keep a journal – it’s very hard, when you’re 25, to recall what twenty-four felt like.” That’s one of the initial observations you observe, in the longer, character-rich books, which have seventeen main characters 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 man and a woman, you can detect in the dialogue.

An Author's Tale

The origin story of Riders was so pitch-perfectly Jilly Cooper it can’t possibly have been accurate, except it absolutely is real because a London paper made a public request about it at the time: she wrote the entire draft in 1970, prior to the Romances, brought it into the West End and forgot it on a public transport. Some detail has been purposely excluded of this anecdote – what, for case, was so important in the city that you would forget the sole version of your novel on a bus, which is not that unlike forgetting your baby on a railway? Surely an rendezvous, but what sort?

Cooper was inclined to amp up her own disorder and clumsiness