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The beloved novelist Jilly Cooper, who left us unexpectedly at the age of 88, racked up sales of 11 million copies of her assorted grand books over her five-decade literary career. Adored by every sensible person over a certain age (mid-forties), she was presented to a modern audience last year with the Disney+ adaptation of Rivals.

The Beloved Series

Devoted fans would have wanted to watch the Rutshire chronicles in sequence: beginning with Riders, initially released in 1985, in which the infamous Rupert Campbell-Black, cad, charmer, horse rider, is initially presented. But that’s a minor point – what was remarkable about viewing Rivals as a box set was how effectively Cooper’s world had stood the test of time. The chronicles captured the 1980s: the power dressing and voluminous skirts; the preoccupation with social class; the upper class looking down on the Technicolored nouveau riche, both overlooking everyone else while they complained about how room-temperature their bubbly was; the intimate power struggles, with inappropriate behavior and assault so commonplace they were virtually figures in their own right, a pair you could count on to move the plot along.

While Cooper might have occupied this period fully, she was never the classic fish not noticing the ocean because it’s everywhere. She had a empathy and an perceptive wisdom that you maybe wouldn’t guess from hearing her talk. Everyone, from the dog to the equine to her mother and father to her French exchange’s brother, was always “absolutely sweet” – unless, that is, they were “truly heavenly”. People got harassed and further in Cooper’s work, but that was never condoned – it’s surprising how OK it is in many supposedly sophisticated books of the era.

Background and Behavior

She was well-to-do, which for real-world terms meant that her parent had to work for a living, but she’d have characterized the strata more by their values. The middle-class people anxiously contemplated about all things, all the time – what society might think, mostly – and the elite didn’t bother with “stuff”. She was risqué, at times extremely, but her dialogue was never vulgar.

She’d describe her childhood in storybook prose: “Dad went to the war and Mother was terribly, terribly worried”. They were both absolutely stunning, participating in a enduring romance, and this Cooper mirrored in her own union, to a editor of war books, Leo Cooper. She was in her mid-twenties, he was twenty-seven, the union wasn’t smooth sailing (he was a unfaithful type), but she was never less than confident giving people the recipe for a successful union, which is noisy mattress but (key insight), they’re creaking with all the joy. He never read her books – he read Prudence once, when he had flu, and said it made him feel more ill. She didn’t mind, and said it was reciprocated: she wouldn’t be caught reading military history.

Forever keep a notebook – it’s very hard, when you’re mid-twenties, to recall what twenty-four felt like

Early Works

Prudence (1978) was the fifth volume in the Romance collection, which started with Emily in 1975. If you discovered Cooper from the later works, having started in Rutshire, the initial books, also known as “the novels named after affluent ladies” – also Octavia and Harriet – were near misses, every hero feeling like a test-run for Rupert, every female lead a little bit insipid. 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 uptight on matters of modesty, women always fretting that men would think they’re loose, men saying ridiculous comments about why they preferred virgins (in much the same way, apparently, as a true gentleman always wants to be the primary to unseal a jar of Nescafé). I don’t know if I’d recommend reading these stories at a formative age. I assumed for a while that that’s what the upper class genuinely felt.

They were, however, remarkably precisely constructed, effective romances, which is much harder than it sounds. You experienced Harriet’s unplanned pregnancy, Bella’s difficult relatives, 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 early days, put your finger on how she managed it. Suddenly you’d be smiling at her incredibly close descriptions of the bed linen, the following moment you’d have emotional response and little understanding how they arrived.

Writing Wisdom

Inquired how to be a novelist, Cooper used to say the sort of advice that Ernest Hemingway would have said, if he could have been inclined to assist a novice: use all 5 of your perceptions, say how things smelled and appeared and heard and tactile and palatable – it really lifts the writing. But likely more helpful was: “Always keep a journal – it’s very difficult, when you’re 25, to recall what being 24 felt like.” That’s one of the first things you notice, in the more detailed, character-rich books, which have seventeen main characters rather than just one lead, all with extremely posh names, unless they’re from the US, in which case they’re called Helen. Even an generational gap of four years, between two relatives, between a man and a lady, you can hear in the dialogue.

The Lost Manuscript

The historical account of Riders was so exactly Jilly Cooper it couldn't possibly have been true, except it certainly was real because a major newspaper made a public request about it at the era: she finished the entire draft in the early 70s, well before the first books, took it into the city center and misplaced it on a public transport. Some texture has been purposely excluded of this story – what, for instance, was so crucial in the city that you would abandon the unique draft of your manuscript on a bus, which is not that unlike forgetting your baby on a transport? Surely an assignation, but what kind?

Cooper was prone to exaggerate her own messiness and haplessness