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The celebrated author Jilly Cooper, who passed away unexpectedly at the 88 years of age, achieved sales of 11m volumes of her many grand books over her 50-year career in writing. Adored by all discerning readers over a specific age (mid-forties), she was introduced to a younger audience last year with the streaming series adaptation of Rivals.

Cooper's Fictional Universe

Longtime readers would have preferred to view the Rutshire chronicles in order: commencing with Riders, originally published in 1985, in which the character Rupert Campbell-Black, scoundrel, philanderer, horse rider, is first introduced. But that’s a sidebar – what was notable about viewing Rivals as a box set was how well Cooper’s fictional realm had aged. The chronicles captured the 80s: the power dressing and puffball skirts; the fixation on status; nobility disdaining the Technicolored nouveau riche, both dismissing everyone else while they quibbled about how room-temperature their champagne was; the gender dynamics, with unwanted advances and assault so everyday they were virtually figures in their own right, a double act you could rely on to drive the narrative forward.

While Cooper might have lived in this age totally, she was never the classic fish not perceiving the ocean because it’s ubiquitous. She had a empathy and an keen insight that you could easily miss from hearing her talk. Every character, from the dog to the horse to her mother and father to her international student's relative, was always “completely delightful” – unless, that is, they were “truly heavenly”. People got groped and more in Cooper’s work, but that was never OK – it’s remarkable how tolerated it is in many supposedly sophisticated books of the period.

Class and Character

She was well-to-do, which for practical purposes meant that her dad had to work for a living, but she’d have characterized the classes more by their values. The middle classes fretted about everything, all the time – what others might think, mostly – and the upper classes didn’t give a … well “nonsense”. She was raunchy, at times extremely, but her prose was always refined.

She’d recount her family life in storybook prose: “Dad went to Dunkirk and Mother was extremely anxious”. They were both utterly beautiful, involved in a eternal partnership, and this Cooper mirrored in her own partnership, to a editor of military histories, Leo Cooper. She was 24, he was 27, the relationship wasn’t perfect (he was a bit of a shagger), but she was never less than at ease giving people the formula for a happy marriage, which is noisy mattress but (big reveal), they’re squeaking with all the joy. He avoided reading her books – he picked up Prudence once, when he had flu, and said it made him feel worse. She took no offense, and said it was reciprocated: she wouldn’t be caught reading military history.

Always keep a journal – it’s very challenging, when you’re twenty-five, to recall what age 24 felt like

The Romance Series

Prudence (1978) was the fifth installment in the Romance collection, which began with Emily in 1975. If you approached Cooper from the later works, having begun in Rutshire, the Romances, also known as “the novels named after posh girls” – also Bella and Harriet – were close but no cigar, every male lead feeling like a test-run for Rupert, every main character a little bit insipid. Plus, line for line (Without exact data), there wasn't the same quantity of sex in them. They were a bit conservative on issues of decorum, women always fretting that men would think they’re immoral, men saying outrageous statements about why they favored virgins (similarly, seemingly, as a genuine guy always wants to be the primary to open a tin of Nescafé). I don’t know if I’d advise reading these books at a formative age. I believed for a while that that’s what affluent individuals really thought.

They were, however, remarkably precisely constructed, high-functioning romances, which is far more difficult than it sounds. You experienced Harriet’s surprise baby, Bella’s annoying in-laws, Emily’s Scottish isolation – Cooper could take you from an hopeless moment to a jackpot of the soul, and you could not once, even in the early days, put your finger on how she achieved it. One minute you’d be smiling at her meticulously detailed descriptions of the sheets, the subsequently you’d have tears in your eyes and uncertainty how they arrived.

Authorial Advice

Questioned how to be a author, Cooper would often state the type of guidance that Ernest Hemingway would have said, if he could have been arsed to guide a beginner: employ all all of your senses, say how things aromatic and seemed and audible and touched and palatable – it significantly enhances the narrative. But likely more helpful was: “Always keep a diary – it’s very difficult, when you’re mid-twenties, to remember what age 24 felt like.” That’s one of the first things you notice, in the longer, character-rich books, which have numerous female leads rather than just a single protagonist, all with decidedly aristocratic names, unless they’re from the US, in which case they’re called a common name. Even an years apart of a few years, between two relatives, between a male and a woman, you can perceive in the speech.

An Author's Tale

The backstory of Riders was so pitch-perfectly characteristically Cooper it can’t possibly have been accurate, except it absolutely is factual because a major newspaper made a public request about it at the period: she completed the entire draft in the early 70s, long before the Romances, took it into the West End and left it on a bus. Some detail has been deliberately left out of this tale – what, for example, was so crucial in the West End that you would abandon the sole version of your manuscript on a train, which is not that different from forgetting your baby on a train? Undoubtedly an rendezvous, but what kind?

Cooper was prone to exaggerate her own messiness and haplessness