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The beloved novelist Jilly Cooper, who left us unexpectedly at the 88 years of age, achieved sales of eleven million volumes of her many grand books over her five-decade writing career. Adored by all discerning readers over a specific age (mid-forties), she was introduced to a new generation last year with the TV adaptation of Rivals.

Cooper's Fictional Universe

Longtime readers would have wanted to watch the Rutshire chronicles in chronological order: commencing with Riders, originally published in 1985, in which Rupert Campbell-Black, rogue, heartbreaker, horse rider, is initially presented. But that’s a sidebar – what was remarkable about seeing Rivals as a complete series was how well Cooper’s fictional realm had remained relevant. The chronicles captured the eighties: the shoulder pads and voluminous skirts; the fixation on status; aristocrats looking down on the flashy new money, both dismissing everyone else while they snipped about how warm their sparkling wine was; the gender dynamics, with harassment and assault so routine they were almost characters in their own right, a duo you could trust to move the plot along.

While Cooper might have lived in this age completely, she was never the typical fish not perceiving the ocean because it’s ubiquitous. She had a empathy and an perceptive wisdom that you could easily miss from listening to her speak. All her creations, from the dog to the equine to her mother and father to her international student's relative, was always “utterly charming” – unless, that is, they were “truly heavenly”. People got assaulted and more in Cooper’s work, but that was never OK – it’s remarkable how acceptable it is in many more highbrow books of the period.

Social Strata and Personality

She was upper-middle-class, which for all intents and purposes meant that her dad had to work for a living, but she’d have described the social classes more by their mores. The middle-class people anxiously contemplated about all things, all the time – what other people might think, mostly – and the aristocracy didn’t care a … well “such things”. She was risqué, at times extremely, but her language was never vulgar.

She’d narrate her childhood in storybook prose: “Daddy went to battle and Mummy was terribly, terribly worried”. They were both utterly beautiful, engaged in a lifelong love match, and this Cooper emulated in her own marriage, to a publisher of military histories, Leo Cooper. She was twenty-four, he was in his late twenties, the union wasn’t without hiccups (he was a philanderer), but she was always comfortable giving people the secret for a happy marriage, which is squeaky bed but (crucial point), they’re creaking with all the laughter. He didn't read 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 returned: she wouldn’t be spotted reading military history.

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

Early Works

Prudence (1978) was the fifth installment in the Romance series, which commenced with Emily in 1975. If you approached Cooper in reverse, having begun in her later universe, the initial books, alternatively called “the books named after affluent ladies” – also Bella and Harriet – were almost there, every hero feeling like a prototype for Campbell-Black, every main character 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 decorum, women always being anxious that men would think they’re promiscuous, men saying ridiculous comments about why they preferred virgins (comparably, apparently, as a real man always wants to be the first to open a tin of Nescafé). I don’t know if I’d recommend reading these books at a formative age. I assumed for a while that that was what posh people really thought.

They were, however, extremely well-crafted, high-functioning romances, which is far more difficult than it sounds. You experienced Harriet’s surprise baby, Bella’s difficult in-laws, Emily’s remote Scottish life – Cooper could guide you from an all-is-lost moment to a lottery win of the emotions, and you could never, even in the early days, identify how she achieved it. At one moment you’d be chuckling at her incredibly close depictions of the bed linen, the following moment you’d have watery eyes and uncertainty how they arrived.

Writing Wisdom

Inquired how to be a author, Cooper used to say the kind of thing that the literary giant would have said, if he could have been inclined to assist a aspiring writer: use all 5 of your perceptions, say how things scented and appeared and heard and touched and palatable – it really lifts the prose. But likely more helpful was: “Constantly keep a notebook – it’s very challenging, when you’re mid-twenties, to recall what being 24 felt like.” That’s one of the initial observations you detect, in the more extensive, more populated books, which have 17 heroines rather than just one, all with extremely posh names, unless they’re from the US, in which case they’re called a simple moniker. Even an years apart of a few years, between two sisters, between a man and a female, you can perceive in the speech.

An Author's Tale

The origin story of Riders was so perfectly typical of the author it might not have been real, except it absolutely is factual because London’s Evening Standard ran an appeal about it at the era: she finished the whole manuscript in 1970, long before the first books, carried it into the West End and misplaced it on a vehicle. Some context has been deliberately left out of this story – what, for example, was so crucial in the city that you would forget the sole version of your book on a bus, which is not that far from abandoning your infant on a train? Surely an assignation, but what kind?

Cooper was wont to exaggerate her own messiness and haplessness