🔗 Share this article

Jilly Cooper, who left us unexpectedly at the 88 years old, achieved sales of eleven million books of her assorted grand books over her half-century literary career. Beloved by anyone with any sense over a specific age (45), she was introduced to a younger audience last year with the Disney+ adaptation of Rivals.

The Beloved Series

Devoted fans 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, charmer, horse rider, is first introduced. But that’s a side note – what was notable about seeing Rivals as a binge-watch was how brilliantly Cooper’s fictional realm had remained relevant. The chronicles encapsulated the 1980s: the power dressing and puffball skirts; the fixation on status; the upper class disdaining the ostentatious newly wealthy, both ignoring everyone else while they quibbled about how room-temperature their champagne was; the intimate power struggles, with inappropriate behavior and assault so everyday they were virtually figures in their own right, a duo you could count on to move the plot along.

While Cooper might have inhabited this period totally, she was never the typical fish not seeing the ocean because it’s ubiquitous. She had a compassion and an keen insight that you might not expect from hearing her talk. Everyone, from the pet to the horse to her family to her international student's relative, was always “utterly charming” – unless, that is, they were “completely exquisite”. People got harassed and worse in Cooper’s work, but that was never OK – it’s astonishing how OK it is in many supposedly sophisticated books of the period.

Social Strata and Personality

She was affluent middle-class, which for practical purposes meant that her parent had to earn an income, but she’d have defined the classes more by their customs. The middle-class people fretted about all things, all the time – what other people might think, mainly – and the upper classes didn’t give a … well “such things”. She was risqué, at times incredibly so, but her prose was never coarse.

She’d narrate her childhood in storybook prose: “Dad went to the war and Mother was deeply concerned”. They were both absolutely stunning, engaged in a enduring romance, and this Cooper mirrored in her own marriage, to a publisher of war books, Leo Cooper. She was 24, he was 27, the relationship wasn’t without hiccups (he was a unfaithful type), but she was never less than confident giving people the recipe for a happy marriage, which is noisy mattress but (big reveal), they’re creaking with all the mirth. He avoided reading her books – he read Prudence once, when he had influenza, and said it made him feel more ill. She wasn't bothered, and said it was reciprocated: she wouldn’t be spotted reading war chronicles.

Forever keep a journal – it’s very difficult, when you’re twenty-five, to remember what twenty-four felt like

Early Works

Prudence (the late 70s) was the fifth book in the Romance collection, which began with Emily in the mid-70s. If you came to Cooper backwards, having commenced in her later universe, the Romances, alternatively called “the books named after upper-class women” – also Imogen and Harriet – were almost there, every male lead feeling like a prototype for Campbell-Black, every main character a little bit weak. Plus, page for page (Without exact data), there wasn't the same quantity of sex in them. They were a bit conservative on matters of decorum, women always worrying that men would think they’re loose, men saying ridiculous comments about why they preferred virgins (comparably, seemingly, as a genuine guy always wants to be the first to open a jar of instant coffee). I don’t know if I’d suggest reading these novels at a young age. I assumed for a while that that was what the upper class really thought.

They were, however, remarkably tightly written, high-functioning romances, which is much harder than it sounds. You lived Harriet’s surprise baby, Bella’s annoying in-laws, Emily’s Scottish isolation – Cooper could transport you from an hopeless moment to a jackpot of the soul, and you could not once, even in the initial stages, pinpoint how she achieved it. At one moment you’d be laughing at her meticulously detailed depictions of the bed linen, the next you’d have watery eyes and uncertainty how they got there.

Writing Wisdom

Questioned how to be a novelist, Cooper used to say the sort of advice that the famous author would have said, if he could have been arsed to help out a aspiring writer: utilize all 5 of your faculties, say how things smelled and looked and audible and tactile and tasted – it greatly improves the narrative. But likely more helpful was: “Forever keep a diary – it’s very hard, when you’re mid-twenties, to remember what being 24 felt like.” That’s one of the primary realizations you notice, in the more extensive, 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 Helen. Even an generational gap of several years, between two relatives, between a gentleman and a lady, you can hear in the speech.

The Lost Manuscript

The backstory of Riders was so pitch-perfectly Jilly Cooper it couldn't possibly have been real, except it certainly was real because a major newspaper made a public request about it at the time: she wrote the whole manuscript in the early 70s, long before the first books, took it into the West End and left it on a bus. Some context has been purposely excluded of this story – what, for case, was so significant in the West End that you would abandon the sole version of your novel on a train, which is not that far from leaving your baby on a transport? Certainly an assignation, but which type?

Cooper was prone to embellish her own messiness and clumsiness