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The beloved novelist Jilly Cooper, who passed away unexpectedly at the 88 years of age, sold 11 million volumes of her many grand books over her half-century writing career. Cherished by all discerning readers over a specific age (mid-forties), she was brought to a younger audience last year with the TV adaptation of Rivals.

The Rutshire Chronicles

Cooper purists would have wanted to view the Rutshire chronicles in sequence: starting with Riders, originally published in 1985, in which the infamous Rupert Campbell-Black, rogue, heartbreaker, horse rider, is first introduced. But that’s a sidebar – what was remarkable about viewing Rivals as a box set was how well Cooper’s fictional realm had remained relevant. The chronicles captured the 1980s: the broad shoulders and puffball skirts; the fixation on status; aristocrats looking down on the flashy new money, both overlooking everyone else while they snipped about how lukewarm their champagne was; the gender dynamics, with unwanted advances and misconduct so routine they were almost characters in their own right, a duo you could count on to drive the narrative forward.

While Cooper might have lived in this era fully, she was never the proverbial fish not noticing the ocean because it’s all around. She had a humanity and an keen insight that you might not expect from hearing her talk. All her creations, from the dog to the horse to her parents 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 acceptable – it’s astonishing how OK it is in many supposedly sophisticated books of the era.

Social Strata and Personality

She was well-to-do, which for all intents and purposes meant that her dad had to work for a living, but she’d have characterized the social classes more by their customs. The middle classes fretted about all things, all the time – what others might think, mostly – and the elite didn’t care a … well “such things”. She was raunchy, at times very much, but her prose was never coarse.

She’d recount her upbringing in storybook prose: “Daddy went to the war and Mom was deeply concerned”. They were both completely gorgeous, engaged in a enduring romance, and this Cooper emulated in her own marriage, to a businessman of historical accounts, Leo Cooper. She was 24, he was twenty-seven, the union wasn’t without hiccups (he was a bit of a shagger), but she was consistently comfortable giving people the recipe for a blissful partnership, which is creaking bed springs but (crucial point), they’re squeaking with all the joy. He never read her books – he tried Prudence once, when he had a cold, and said it made him feel more ill. She wasn't bothered, and said it was mutual: she wouldn’t be seen dead reading military history.

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

Early Works

Prudence (1978) was the fifth volume in the Romance series, which started with Emily in 1975. If you came to Cooper backwards, having begun in Rutshire, the Romances, AKA “the books named after affluent ladies” – also Bella and Harriet – were close but no cigar, every protagonist feeling like a test-run for the iconic character, every heroine a little bit insipid. 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 issues of decorum, women always fretting that men would think they’re loose, men saying ridiculous comments about why they favored virgins (in much the same way, apparently, as a real man always wants to be the primary to unseal a jar of Nescafé). I don’t know if I’d recommend reading these books at a impressionable age. I thought for a while that that is what posh people actually believed.

They were, however, extremely precisely constructed, effective romances, which is much harder than it appears. You lived Harriet’s unwanted pregnancy, Bella’s annoying relatives, Emily’s loneliness in Scotland – Cooper could transport you from an desperate moment to a jackpot of the heart, and you could not once, even in the early days, identify how she managed it. At one moment you’d be chuckling at her meticulously detailed descriptions of the bedding, the following moment you’d have watery eyes and no idea how they arrived.

Literary Guidance

Questioned how to be a writer, Cooper used to say the sort of advice that Ernest Hemingway would have said, if he could have been arsed to guide a beginner: use all 5 of your senses, say how things smelled and looked and sounded and tactile and flavored – it really lifts the writing. But probably more useful was: “Forever keep a notebook – it’s very difficult, when you’re mid-twenties, to recollect what twenty-four felt like.” That’s one of the first things you detect, in the more detailed, densely peopled books, which have numerous female leads rather than just one lead, all with decidedly aristocratic names, unless they’re from the US, in which case they’re called Helen. Even an generational gap of several years, between two siblings, between a man and a lady, you can detect in the dialogue.

An Author's Tale

The historical account of Riders was so exactly characteristically Cooper it couldn't possibly have been true, except it certainly was true because a major newspaper ran an appeal about it at the time: she wrote the entire draft in 1970, well before the Romances, took it into the city center and left it on a bus. Some detail has been purposely excluded of this tale – what, for instance, was so significant in the urban area that you would abandon the unique draft of your manuscript on a public transport, which is not that different from leaving your baby on a railway? Undoubtedly an rendezvous, but which type?

Cooper was inclined to embellish her own messiness and haplessness