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The celebrated author Jilly Cooper, who passed away unexpectedly at the age of 88, sold 11m books of her various epic books over her five-decade writing career. Beloved by anyone with any sense over a particular age (mid-forties), she was presented to a younger audience last year with the TV adaptation of Rivals.

The Rutshire Chronicles

Devoted fans would have liked to view the Rutshire chronicles in chronological order: beginning with Riders, originally published in 1985, in which the infamous Rupert Campbell-Black, scoundrel, philanderer, rider, is debuts. But that’s a sidebar – what was remarkable about seeing Rivals as a binge-watch was how effectively Cooper’s world had stood the test of time. The chronicles encapsulated the 1980s: the broad shoulders and voluminous skirts; the fixation on status; nobility looking down on the ostentatious newly wealthy, both dismissing everyone else while they complained about how lukewarm their bubbly was; the sexual politics, with inappropriate behavior and abuse so routine they were virtually figures in their own right, a pair you could count on to drive the narrative forward.

While Cooper might have occupied this age completely, she was never the proverbial fish not noticing the ocean because it’s everywhere. She had a empathy and an observational intelligence that you maybe wouldn’t guess from her public persona. Every character, from the dog to the pony to her mother and father to her French exchange’s brother, was always “absolutely sweet” – unless, that is, they were “absolutely divine”. People got groped and more in Cooper’s work, but that was never condoned – it’s astonishing how tolerated it is in many supposedly sophisticated books of the time.

Background and Behavior

She was upper-middle-class, which for practical purposes meant that her dad had to earn an income, but she’d have described the classes more by their values. The middle-class people worried about all things, all the time – what others might think, mostly – and the upper classes didn’t care a … well “stuff”. She was raunchy, at times very much, but her dialogue was never coarse.

She’d recount her family life in storybook prose: “Daddy went to the war and Mummy was terribly, terribly worried”. They were both completely gorgeous, participating in a lifelong love match, and this Cooper emulated in her own partnership, to a publisher of historical accounts, Leo Cooper. She was twenty-four, he was 27, the marriage wasn’t smooth sailing (he was a unfaithful type), but she was always confident giving people the secret for a successful union, which is creaking bed springs but (key insight), they’re noisy with all the laughter. He never read her books – he read Prudence once, when he had a cold, and said it made him feel worse. She wasn't bothered, and said it was reciprocated: she wouldn’t be seen dead reading military history.

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

Early Works

Prudence (1978) was the fifth book in the Romance collection, which commenced with Emily in 1975. If you approached Cooper in reverse, having commenced in the main series, the Romances, also known as “the novels named after affluent ladies” – also Bella and Harriet – were close but no cigar, every male lead feeling like a prototype for Rupert, every female lead a little bit weak. Plus, page for page (I can't verify statistically), there wasn't the same quantity of sex in them. They were a bit uptight on topics of modesty, women always worrying that men would think they’re immoral, men saying ridiculous comments about why they liked virgins (in much the same way, apparently, as a true gentleman always wants to be the first to break a container of coffee). I don’t know if I’d suggest reading these books at a young age. I believed for a while that that was what posh people actually believed.

They were, however, remarkably tightly written, successful romances, which is far more difficult than it sounds. You experienced Harriet’s surprise baby, Bella’s pissy family-by-marriage, Emily’s loneliness in Scotland – Cooper could take you from an all-is-lost moment to a lottery win of the heart, and you could not ever, even in the initial stages, identify how she did it. At one moment you’d be laughing at her meticulously detailed accounts of the sheets, the following moment you’d have watery eyes and uncertainty how they appeared.

Authorial Advice

Asked how to be a novelist, Cooper would often state the type of guidance that the famous author would have said, if he could have been inclined to guide a novice: utilize all 5 of your faculties, say how things aromatic and looked and heard and touched and tasted – it greatly improves the prose. But probably more useful was: “Constantly keep a journal – it’s very challenging, when you’re twenty-five, to recall what twenty-four 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 very upper-class names, unless they’re American, in which case they’re called Helen. Even an age difference of four years, between two sisters, between a man and a woman, you can hear in the speech.

An Author's Tale

The origin story of Riders was so exactly characteristically Cooper it might not have been accurate, except it certainly was true because London’s Evening Standard ran an appeal about it at the period: she wrote the entire draft in 1970, prior to the early novels, carried it into the downtown and forgot it on a bus. Some detail has been deliberately left out of this tale – what, for instance, was so crucial in the urban area that you would forget the unique draft of your manuscript on a train, which is not that different from abandoning your infant on a train? Surely an rendezvous, but which type?

Cooper was prone to embellish her own chaos and ineptitude