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The beloved novelist Jilly Cooper, who left us unexpectedly at the 88 years of age, achieved sales of 11 million copies of her various sweeping books over her 50-year career in writing. Cherished by all discerning readers over a certain age (forty-five), she was presented to a modern audience last year with the Disney+ adaptation of Rivals.

The Rutshire Chronicles

Devoted fans would have preferred to watch the Rutshire chronicles in sequence: starting with Riders, first published in the mid-80s, in which the character Rupert Campbell-Black, scoundrel, philanderer, rider, is debuts. But that’s a minor point – what was notable about watching Rivals as a box set was how well Cooper’s world had remained relevant. The chronicles distilled the eighties: the broad shoulders and puffball skirts; the preoccupation with social class; the upper class disdaining the flashy new money, both overlooking everyone else while they snipped about how room-temperature their champagne was; the intimate power struggles, with harassment and abuse so commonplace they were virtually characters in their own right, a duo you could count on to drive the narrative forward.

While Cooper might have occupied this period fully, she was never the classic fish not noticing the ocean because it’s all around. She had a humanity and an observational intelligence that you might not expect from listening to her speak. Every character, from the canine to the horse to her mother and father to her French exchange’s brother, was always “absolutely sweet” – unless, that is, they were “absolutely divine”. People got harassed and further in Cooper’s work, but that was never OK – it’s astonishing how acceptable it is in many far more literary books of the period.

Background and Behavior

She was affluent middle-class, which for practical purposes meant that her father had to earn an income, but she’d have defined the classes more by their mores. The middle-class people anxiously contemplated about all things, all the time – what society might think, mainly – and the elite didn’t bother with “such things”. She was spicy, at times very much, but her dialogue was never coarse.

She’d narrate her family life in idyllic language: “Daddy went to Dunkirk and Mummy was deeply concerned”. They were both absolutely stunning, participating in a lifelong love match, and this Cooper replicated in her own partnership, to a editor of military histories, Leo Cooper. She was in her mid-twenties, he was twenty-seven, the marriage wasn’t perfect (he was a philanderer), but she was consistently confident giving people the formula for a happy marriage, which is creaking bed springs but (crucial point), they’re squeaking with all the laughter. He didn't read her books – he read Prudence once, when he had influenza, and said it made him feel unwell. She took no offense, and said it was returned: she wouldn’t be spotted reading war chronicles.

Constantly keep a journal – it’s very difficult, when you’re 25, to recollect what twenty-four felt like

Initial Novels

Prudence (1978) was the fifth book in the Romance series, which commenced with Emily in 1975. If you approached Cooper backwards, having begun in Rutshire, the Romances, also known as “the novels named after upper-class women” – also Octavia and Harriet – were near misses, every male lead feeling like a trial version for the iconic character, every female lead a little bit drippy. Plus, chapter for chapter (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 promiscuous, men saying batshit things about why they preferred virgins (similarly, apparently, as a true gentleman always wants to be the primary to open a jar of instant coffee). I don’t know if I’d advise reading these stories at a young age. I believed for a while that that is what posh people really thought.

They were, however, remarkably tightly written, successful romances, which is considerably tougher than it appears. You felt Harriet’s unplanned pregnancy, Bella’s pissy relatives, Emily’s loneliness in Scotland – Cooper could take you from an hopeless moment to a lottery win of the soul, and you could never, even in the initial stages, put your finger on how she achieved it. At one moment you’d be smiling at her incredibly close descriptions of the sheets, the next you’d have watery eyes and little understanding how they got there.

Authorial Advice

Inquired how to be a novelist, Cooper frequently advised the kind of thing that Ernest Hemingway would have said, if he could have been inclined to guide a novice: use all all of your senses, say how things smelled and seemed and heard and felt and tasted – it significantly enhances the writing. But perhaps more practical was: “Constantly keep a journal – it’s very hard, when you’re 25, to remember what age 24 felt like.” That’s one of the first things you observe, in the longer, densely peopled books, which have seventeen main characters rather than just one lead, all with very upper-class names, unless they’re American, in which case they’re called a common name. Even an age difference of several years, between two siblings, between a male and a woman, you can hear in the speech.

The Lost Manuscript

The backstory of Riders was so exactly Jilly Cooper it might not have been accurate, except it definitely is factual because London’s Evening Standard published a notice about it at the era: she finished the complete book in the early 70s, long before the early novels, carried it into the downtown and misplaced it on a public transport. Some texture has been purposely excluded of this tale – what, for instance, was so crucial in the urban area that you would leave the sole version of your novel on a train, which is not that far from forgetting your infant on a transport? Undoubtedly an assignation, but what kind?

Cooper was inclined to amp up her own disorder and clumsiness