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The celebrated author Jilly Cooper, who died suddenly at the age of 88, racked up sales of eleven million books of her many sweeping books over her five-decade writing career. Beloved by every sensible person over a particular age (45), she was presented to a modern audience last year with the TV adaptation of Rivals.

The Rutshire Chronicles

Longtime readers would have preferred to see the Rutshire chronicles in sequence: beginning with Riders, initially released in 1985, in which Rupert Campbell-Black, rogue, philanderer, equestrian, is initially presented. But that’s a sidebar – what was notable about seeing Rivals as a complete series was how well Cooper’s world had aged. The chronicles encapsulated the 1980s: the power dressing and bubble skirts; the fixation on status; the upper class looking down on the flashy new money, both dismissing everyone else while they quibbled about how room-temperature their bubbly was; the sexual politics, with unwanted advances and abuse so commonplace they were almost personas in their own right, a pair you could trust to move the plot along.

While Cooper might have occupied this age completely, she was never the typical fish not noticing the ocean because it’s all around. She had a empathy and an keen insight that you could easily miss from hearing her talk. Every character, from the pet to the pony to her parents to her foreign exchange sibling, was always “absolutely sweet” – unless, that is, they were “completely exquisite”. People got assaulted and further in Cooper’s work, but that was never acceptable – it’s surprising how tolerated it is in many more highbrow books of the era.

Class and Character

She was well-to-do, which for real-world terms meant that her father had to hold down a job, but she’d have described the strata more by their mores. The bourgeoisie worried about every little detail, all the time – what other people might think, mainly – and the aristocracy didn’t give a … well “nonsense”. She was spicy, at times extremely, but her prose was never vulgar.

She’d recount her childhood in idyllic language: “Father went to the war and Mummy was terribly, terribly worried”. They were both absolutely stunning, involved in a lifelong love match, and this Cooper replicated in her own union, to a publisher of military histories, Leo Cooper. She was in her mid-twenties, he was 27, the relationship wasn’t smooth sailing (he was a unfaithful type), but she was always confident giving people the secret for a successful union, which is noisy mattress but (crucial point), they’re noisy with all the joy. He avoided reading her books – he picked up Prudence once, when he had a cold, and said it made him feel unwell. She wasn't bothered, and said it was reciprocated: she wouldn’t be seen dead reading war chronicles.

Always keep a diary – it’s very hard, when you’re mid-twenties, to remember what twenty-four felt like

Early Works

Prudence (the late 70s) was the fifth installment in the Romance series, which began with Emily in 1975. If you approached Cooper backwards, having started in Rutshire, the early novels, also known as “those ones named after posh girls” – also Octavia and Harriet – were near misses, every male lead feeling like a test-run for Rupert, every main character 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 issues of propriety, women always being anxious that men would think they’re immoral, men saying ridiculous comments about why they preferred virgins (in much the same way, seemingly, as a real man always wants to be the initial to break a container of instant coffee). I don’t know if I’d advise reading these novels at a young age. I thought for a while that that was what posh people actually believed.

They were, however, incredibly precisely constructed, effective romances, which is considerably tougher than it appears. You felt Harriet’s unwanted pregnancy, Bella’s difficult family-by-marriage, Emily’s loneliness in Scotland – Cooper could take you from an desperate moment to a windfall of the emotions, and you could not ever, even in the beginning, identify how she achieved it. Suddenly you’d be laughing at her meticulously detailed accounts of the bedding, the next you’d have watery eyes and little understanding how they appeared.

Writing Wisdom

Inquired how to be a writer, Cooper would often state the sort of advice that Ernest Hemingway would have said, if he could have been inclined to help out a aspiring writer: employ all five of your senses, say how things scented and appeared and audible and tactile and tasted – it greatly improves the prose. But perhaps more practical was: “Constantly keep a diary – it’s very challenging, when you’re twenty-five, to remember what twenty-four felt like.” That’s one of the initial observations you detect, in the longer, character-rich books, which have numerous female leads rather than just one lead, all with extremely posh names, unless they’re Stateside, in which case they’re called a common name. Even an generational gap of four years, between two siblings, between a male and a woman, you can perceive in the conversation.

A Literary Mystery

The origin story of Riders was so pitch-perfectly characteristically Cooper it might not have been real, except it absolutely is true because a major newspaper ran an appeal about it at the time: she wrote the complete book in the early 70s, well before the Romances, took it into the West End and misplaced it on a vehicle. Some context has been purposely excluded of this anecdote – what, for instance, was so important in the urban area that you would leave the sole version of your book on a public transport, which is not that unlike forgetting your infant on a railway? Undoubtedly an rendezvous, but which type?

Cooper was wont to embellish her own messiness and clumsiness