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The celebrated author Jilly Cooper, who died suddenly at the age of 88, racked up sales of 11m books of her many sweeping books over her half-century literary career. Beloved by every sensible person over a specific age (forty-five), she was presented to a modern audience last year with the streaming series adaptation of Rivals.

The Rutshire Chronicles

Cooper purists would have liked to watch the Rutshire chronicles in sequence: beginning with Riders, originally published in 1985, in which the infamous Rupert Campbell-Black, scoundrel, heartbreaker, rider, is initially presented. But that’s a minor point – what was striking about seeing Rivals as a box set was how brilliantly Cooper’s fictional realm had stood the test of time. The chronicles encapsulated the eighties: the power dressing and bubble skirts; the fixation on status; nobility looking down on the ostentatious newly wealthy, both dismissing everyone else while they complained about how lukewarm their sparkling wine was; the sexual politics, with inappropriate behavior and assault so routine they were practically characters in their own right, a double act you could rely on to move the plot along.

While Cooper might have lived in this period completely, she was never the proverbial fish not perceiving the ocean because it’s everywhere. She had a compassion and an keen insight that you maybe wouldn’t guess from listening to her speak. Every character, from the pet to the pony to her parents to her French exchange’s brother, was always “utterly charming” – unless, that is, they were “truly heavenly”. People got assaulted and more in Cooper’s work, but that was never acceptable – it’s surprising how tolerated it is in many more highbrow books of the era.

Background and Behavior

She was upper-middle-class, which for practical purposes meant that her father had to work for a living, but she’d have described the social classes more by their mores. The middle-class people fretted about all things, all the time – what society might think, mostly – and the aristocracy didn’t give a … well “stuff”. She was spicy, at times extremely, but her language was always refined.

She’d describe her childhood in fairytale terms: “Daddy went to Dunkirk and Mother was extremely anxious”. They were both utterly beautiful, engaged in a enduring romance, and this Cooper replicated in her own union, to a publisher of historical accounts, Leo Cooper. She was in her mid-twenties, he was 27, the relationship wasn’t perfect (he was a bit of a shagger), but she was always confident giving people the formula for a successful union, which is noisy mattress but (big reveal), they’re noisy with all the mirth. He avoided reading her books – he picked up Prudence once, when he had influenza, and said it made him feel worse. She took no offense, and said it was reciprocated: she wouldn’t be caught reading war chronicles.

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

Early Works

Prudence (1978) was the fifth installment in the Romance novels, which started with Emily in 1975. If you discovered Cooper backwards, having started in Rutshire, the initial books, alternatively called “those ones named after upper-class women” – also Bella and Harriet – were close but no cigar, every protagonist feeling like a trial version for the iconic character, every heroine a little bit drippy. Plus, chapter for chapter (I can't verify statistically), there wasn’t as much sex in them. They were a bit reserved on topics of modesty, women always worrying that men would think they’re loose, men saying outrageous statements about why they liked virgins (in much the same way, ostensibly, as a genuine guy always wants to be the primary to open a tin of coffee). I don’t know if I’d suggest reading these stories at a formative age. I assumed for a while that that was what posh people actually believed.

They were, however, extremely well-crafted, high-functioning romances, which is much harder than it seems. You lived Harriet’s unwanted pregnancy, Bella’s annoying relatives, Emily’s loneliness in Scotland – Cooper could take you from an hopeless moment to a lottery win of the heart, and you could not once, even in the initial stages, pinpoint how she did it. Suddenly you’d be chuckling at her highly specific depictions of the sheets, the subsequently you’d have watery eyes and little understanding how they appeared.

Writing Wisdom

Questioned how to be a writer, Cooper used to say the sort of advice that the famous author would have said, if he could have been inclined to guide a aspiring writer: utilize all all of your perceptions, say how things smelled and seemed and sounded and felt and flavored – it significantly enhances the writing. But likely more helpful was: “Always keep a notebook – it’s very hard, when you’re mid-twenties, to recall what age 24 felt like.” That’s one of the primary realizations you observe, in the more extensive, densely peopled books, which have seventeen main characters rather than just one, all with decidedly aristocratic names, unless they’re Stateside, in which case they’re called a common name. Even an age difference of four years, between two relatives, between a male and a lady, you can perceive in the speech.

A Literary Mystery

The origin story of Riders was so pitch-perfectly Jilly Cooper it might not have been accurate, except it absolutely is real because a London paper published a notice about it at the era: she finished the complete book in 1970, prior to the early novels, carried it into the city center and left it on a public transport. Some texture has been purposely excluded of this tale – what, for instance, was so significant in the urban area that you would leave the sole version of your book on a public transport, which is not that far from leaving your child on a transport? Surely an rendezvous, but which type?

Cooper was wont to amp up her own chaos and haplessness