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The celebrated author Jilly Cooper, who left us unexpectedly at the 88 years old, racked up sales of 11 million books of her many epic books over her five-decade career in writing. Adored by anyone with any sense over a specific age (mid-forties), she was introduced to a new generation last year with the Disney+ adaptation of Rivals.

Cooper's Fictional Universe

Cooper purists would have liked to watch the Rutshire chronicles in order: commencing with Riders, first published in 1985, in which the infamous Rupert Campbell-Black, cad, heartbreaker, equestrian, is initially presented. But that’s a minor point – what was remarkable about watching Rivals as a box set was how well Cooper’s fictional realm had remained relevant. The chronicles captured the 80s: the shoulder pads and bubble skirts; the preoccupation with social class; the upper class disdaining the flashy new money, both overlooking everyone else while they complained about how lukewarm their sparkling wine was; the intimate power struggles, with harassment and misconduct so commonplace they were almost personas in their own right, a double act you could trust to drive the narrative forward.

While Cooper might have inhabited this period totally, she was never the classic fish not perceiving the ocean because it’s everywhere. She had a humanity and an perceptive wisdom that you could easily miss from her public persona. Every character, from the canine to the pony to her family to her international student's relative, was always “absolutely sweet” – unless, that is, they were “truly heavenly”. People got harassed and more in Cooper’s work, but that was never OK – it’s remarkable how acceptable it is in many supposedly sophisticated books of the era.

Social Strata and Personality

She was upper-middle-class, which for all intents and purposes meant that her parent had to work for a living, but she’d have defined the social classes more by their mores. The middle classes worried about all things, all the time – what other people might think, mostly – and the upper classes didn’t bother with “nonsense”. She was risqué, at times very much, but her dialogue was always refined.

She’d describe her childhood in idyllic language: “Daddy went to the war and Mom was deeply concerned”. They were both completely gorgeous, participating in a lifelong love match, and this Cooper replicated in her own partnership, to a businessman of military histories, Leo Cooper. She was twenty-four, he was in his late twenties, the relationship wasn’t perfect (he was a unfaithful type), but she was never less than comfortable giving people the secret for a successful union, which is squeaky bed but (crucial point), they’re noisy with all the joy. He never read her books – he read Prudence once, when he had a cold, and said it made him feel worse. She took no offense, and said it was returned: she wouldn’t be seen dead reading war chronicles.

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

Initial Novels

Prudence (1978) was the fifth volume in the Romance novels, which began with Emily in the mid-70s. If you discovered Cooper from the later works, having commenced in her later universe, the early novels, AKA “those ones named after affluent ladies” – also Octavia and Harriet – were near misses, every hero feeling like a trial version for Campbell-Black, every main character a little bit weak. Plus, chapter for chapter (I can't verify statistically), there wasn't the same quantity of sex in them. They were a bit reserved on matters of propriety, women always worrying that men would think they’re loose, men saying ridiculous comments about why they favored virgins (in much the same way, seemingly, as a genuine guy always wants to be the primary to open a jar of instant coffee). I don’t know if I’d advise reading these books at a formative age. I assumed for a while that that’s what posh people actually believed.

They were, however, extremely tightly written, successful romances, which is considerably tougher than it sounds. You felt Harriet’s unplanned pregnancy, Bella’s difficult relatives, Emily’s loneliness in Scotland – Cooper could take you from an all-is-lost moment to a jackpot of the emotions, and you could not once, even in the initial stages, identify how she achieved it. One minute you’d be chuckling at her incredibly close accounts of the sheets, the subsequently you’d have tears in your eyes and little understanding how they got there.

Literary Guidance

Questioned how to be a author, Cooper frequently advised the sort of advice that the famous author would have said, if he could have been inclined to guide a beginner: employ all 5 of your perceptions, say how things aromatic and looked and audible and tactile and tasted – it really lifts the prose. But probably more useful was: “Always keep a journal – it’s very difficult, when you’re twenty-five, to remember what age 24 felt like.” That’s one of the initial observations you detect, in the more detailed, character-rich books, which have 17 heroines rather than just one, all with extremely posh names, unless they’re American, in which case they’re called a common name. Even an age difference of four years, between two siblings, between a man and a female, you can hear in the conversation.

A Literary Mystery

The origin story of Riders was so perfectly Jilly Cooper it can’t possibly have been accurate, except it definitely is factual because a major newspaper ran an appeal about it at the era: she finished the entire draft in 1970, well before the first books, took it into the West End and misplaced it on a vehicle. Some detail has been intentionally omitted of this story – what, for instance, was so important in the West End that you would abandon the only copy of your manuscript on a public transport, which is not that far from leaving your child on a transport? Undoubtedly an assignation, but what kind?

Cooper was prone to exaggerate her own disorder and clumsiness