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The beloved novelist Jilly Cooper, who left us unexpectedly at the 88 years of age, achieved sales of 11m volumes of her assorted sweeping books over her half-century writing career. 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.

The Rutshire Chronicles

Devoted fans would have liked to view the Rutshire chronicles in sequence: beginning with Riders, first published in the mid-80s, in which the character Rupert Campbell-Black, cad, heartbreaker, horse rider, is debuts. But that’s a side note – what was remarkable about seeing Rivals as a box set was how well Cooper’s universe had stood the test of time. The chronicles distilled the 80s: the power dressing and puffball skirts; the obsession with class; the upper class looking down on the Technicolored nouveau riche, both ignoring everyone else while they quibbled about how warm their sparkling wine was; the intimate power struggles, with unwanted advances and assault so everyday they were almost figures in their own right, a double act you could rely on to drive the narrative forward.

While Cooper might have inhabited this era fully, she was never the proverbial fish not seeing the ocean because it’s ubiquitous. She had a humanity and an observational intelligence that you could easily miss from her public persona. All her creations, from the pet to the horse to her parents to her French exchange’s brother, was always “utterly charming” – unless, that is, they were “truly heavenly”. People got assaulted and worse in Cooper’s work, but that was never OK – it’s remarkable how tolerated it is in many far more literary books of the time.

Background and Behavior

She was well-to-do, which for practical purposes meant that her father had to work for a living, but she’d have defined the strata more by their values. The middle classes fretted about everything, all the time – what society might think, mostly – and the elite didn’t care a … well “nonsense”. She was spicy, at times incredibly so, but her dialogue was never coarse.

She’d narrate her family life in storybook prose: “Dad went to Dunkirk and Mom was extremely anxious”. They were both absolutely stunning, participating in a eternal partnership, and this Cooper mirrored in her own marriage, to a publisher of historical accounts, Leo Cooper. She was in her mid-twenties, he was in his late twenties, the union wasn’t perfect (he was a unfaithful type), but she was consistently confident giving people the secret for a happy marriage, which is noisy mattress but (key insight), they’re noisy with all the laughter. He avoided reading her books – he picked up Prudence once, when he had a cold, and said it made him feel unwell. She wasn't bothered, and said it was reciprocated: she wouldn’t be spotted reading battle accounts.

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

Early Works

Prudence (1978) was the fifth book in the Romance collection, which started with Emily in the mid-70s. If you approached Cooper backwards, having begun in Rutshire, the initial books, also known as “those ones named after upper-class women” – also Bella and Harriet – were close but no cigar, every hero feeling like a trial version for Rupert, every female lead a little bit drippy. 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 topics of decorum, women always worrying that men would think they’re loose, men saying ridiculous comments about why they favored virgins (comparably, ostensibly, as a true gentleman always wants to be the primary to unseal a jar of coffee). I don’t know if I’d recommend reading these novels at a impressionable age. I thought for a while that that was what posh people actually believed.

They were, however, extremely precisely constructed, successful romances, which is much harder than it appears. You experienced Harriet’s unwanted pregnancy, Bella’s annoying family-by-marriage, Emily’s remote Scottish life – Cooper could take you from an all-is-lost moment to a jackpot of the emotions, and you could not ever, even in the initial stages, identify how she managed it. At one moment you’d be smiling at her incredibly close depictions of the bed linen, the subsequently you’d have watery eyes and little understanding how they arrived.

Authorial Advice

Questioned how to be a writer, Cooper frequently advised the kind of thing that the literary giant would have said, if he could have been bothered to guide a beginner: use all 5 of your faculties, say how things smelled and appeared and audible and touched and tasted – it significantly enhances the narrative. But likely more helpful was: “Forever keep a diary – it’s very hard, when you’re 25, to recollect what being 24 felt like.” That’s one of the initial observations you notice, in the more detailed, more populated books, which have numerous female leads rather than just one lead, all with extremely posh names, unless they’re Stateside, in which case they’re called a common name. Even an years apart of several years, between two sisters, between a gentleman and a woman, you can hear in the speech.

The Lost Manuscript

The backstory of Riders was so perfectly characteristically Cooper it couldn't possibly have been accurate, except it absolutely is factual because a London paper ran an appeal about it at the era: she completed the entire draft in 1970, prior to the early novels, brought it into the downtown and misplaced it on a bus. Some detail has been deliberately left out of this story – what, for case, was so crucial in the city that you would leave the unique draft of your novel on a bus, which is not that far from abandoning your infant on a train? Certainly an rendezvous, but what kind?

Cooper was wont to exaggerate her own disorder and ineptitude