🔗 Share this article

The celebrated author Jilly Cooper, who died suddenly at the 88 years old, racked up sales of 11 million books of her assorted grand books over her half-century writing career. Beloved by all discerning readers over a certain age (forty-five), she was presented to a younger audience last year with the Disney+ adaptation of Rivals.

The Beloved Series

Cooper purists would have liked to view the Rutshire chronicles in chronological order: starting with Riders, initially released in 1985, in which Rupert Campbell-Black, scoundrel, philanderer, equestrian, is first introduced. But that’s a side note – what was notable about seeing Rivals as a box set was how brilliantly Cooper’s world had stood the test of time. The chronicles captured the 80s: the shoulder pads and puffball skirts; the preoccupation with social class; nobility looking down on the Technicolored nouveau riche, both dismissing everyone else while they quibbled about how warm their sparkling wine was; the gender dynamics, with unwanted advances and abuse so everyday they were virtually characters in their own right, a double act you could trust to advance the story.

While Cooper might have lived in this period fully, she was never the proverbial fish not seeing the ocean because it’s everywhere. She had a humanity and an observational intelligence that you maybe wouldn’t guess from her public persona. Everyone, from the pet to the pony to her parents 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 acceptable – it’s surprising how tolerated it is in many supposedly sophisticated books of the time.

Social Strata and Personality

She was affluent middle-class, which for practical purposes meant that her father had to work for a living, but she’d have defined the social classes more by their values. The bourgeoisie anxiously contemplated about all things, all the time – what society might think, mostly – and the aristocracy didn’t care a … well “nonsense”. She was raunchy, at times incredibly so, but her language was never vulgar.

She’d describe her family life in fairytale terms: “Dad went to Dunkirk and Mother was extremely anxious”. They were both utterly beautiful, engaged in a lifelong love match, and this Cooper replicated in her own marriage, to a publisher of historical accounts, Leo Cooper. She was twenty-four, he was 27, the union wasn’t smooth sailing (he was a bit of a shagger), but she was always comfortable giving people the recipe for a successful union, which is creaking bed springs but (big reveal), they’re noisy with all the laughter. He didn't read her books – he tried Prudence once, when he had a cold, and said it made him feel unwell. She didn’t mind, and said it was returned: she wouldn’t be seen dead reading war chronicles.

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

The Romance Series

Prudence (the late 70s) was the fifth book in the Romance series, which began with Emily in 1975. If you came to Cooper in reverse, having started in the main series, the initial books, also known as “those ones named after upper-class women” – also Imogen and Harriet – were almost there, every hero feeling like a test-run for Campbell-Black, every heroine a little bit insipid. Plus, chapter for chapter (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 fretting that men would think they’re immoral, men saying outrageous statements about why they preferred virgins (comparably, ostensibly, as a real man always wants to be the initial to break a jar of Nescafé). I don’t know if I’d advise reading these novels at a young age. I believed for a while that that was what the upper class genuinely felt.

They were, however, remarkably precisely constructed, effective romances, which is much harder than it sounds. You lived Harriet’s unplanned pregnancy, Bella’s pissy relatives, Emily’s Scottish isolation – Cooper could take you from an hopeless moment to a lottery win of the emotions, and you could never, even in the initial stages, pinpoint how she achieved it. One minute you’d be chuckling at her incredibly close descriptions of the sheets, the subsequently you’d have watery eyes and uncertainty how they got there.

Literary Guidance

Questioned how to be a novelist, Cooper frequently advised the kind of thing that the famous author would have said, if he could have been arsed to guide a novice: use all 5 of your perceptions, say how things scented and appeared and audible and touched and palatable – it really lifts the prose. But probably more useful was: “Constantly keep a diary – it’s very difficult, when you’re twenty-five, to remember what twenty-four felt like.” That’s one of the initial observations you notice, in the more extensive, densely peopled books, which have seventeen main characters rather than just one, all with decidedly aristocratic names, unless they’re American, in which case they’re called a simple moniker. Even an age difference of a few years, between two sisters, between a man and a woman, you can perceive in the conversation.

The Lost Manuscript

The backstory of Riders was so pitch-perfectly characteristically Cooper it can’t possibly have been accurate, except it certainly was true because a major newspaper published a notice about it at the period: she finished the entire draft in 1970, well before the early novels, carried it into the West End and misplaced it on a public transport. Some detail has been deliberately left out of this story – what, for example, was so significant in the urban area that you would leave the only copy of your book on a public transport, which is not that far from leaving your baby on a train? Surely an assignation, but what sort?

Cooper was inclined to exaggerate her own messiness and ineptitude