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The beloved novelist Jilly Cooper, who died suddenly at the age of 88, racked up sales of 11 million copies of her various sweeping books over her 50-year writing career. Adored by every sensible person over a certain age (45), she was presented to a modern audience last year with the TV adaptation of Rivals.

The Rutshire Chronicles

Longtime readers would have liked to watch the Rutshire chronicles in order: starting with Riders, first published in 1985, in which the character Rupert Campbell-Black, scoundrel, charmer, equestrian, is debuts. But that’s a side note – what was remarkable about seeing Rivals as a box set was how well Cooper’s world had remained relevant. The chronicles captured the 1980s: the shoulder pads and voluminous skirts; the fixation on status; the upper class looking down on the ostentatious newly wealthy, both dismissing everyone else while they quibbled about how warm their champagne was; the gender dynamics, with harassment and abuse so everyday they were virtually personas in their own right, a double act you could trust to drive the narrative forward.

While Cooper might have occupied this age totally, she was never the classic fish not perceiving the ocean because it’s all around. She had a compassion and an perceptive wisdom that you maybe wouldn’t guess from her public persona. Everyone, from the dog to the pony to her mother and father to her French exchange’s brother, was always “utterly charming” – unless, that is, they were “truly heavenly”. People got assaulted and more in Cooper’s work, but that was never OK – it’s surprising how OK it is in many supposedly sophisticated books of the era.

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 defined the strata more by their customs. The middle classes worried about every little detail, all the time – what other people might think, mostly – and the upper classes didn’t care a … well “such things”. She was raunchy, at times very much, but her language was always refined.

She’d recount her upbringing in storybook prose: “Dad went to battle and Mummy was extremely anxious”. They were both utterly beautiful, involved in a enduring romance, and this Cooper replicated in her own marriage, to a editor of military histories, Leo Cooper. She was in her mid-twenties, he was 27, the relationship wasn’t without hiccups (he was a unfaithful type), but she was always at ease giving people the secret for a happy marriage, which is noisy mattress but (crucial point), they’re creaking with all the laughter. He didn't read her books – he read Prudence once, when he had influenza, and said it made him feel more ill. She took no offense, and said it was reciprocated: she wouldn’t be seen dead reading battle accounts.

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

Early Works

Prudence (1978) was the fifth volume in the Romance series, which commenced with Emily in 1975. If you came to Cooper from the later works, having commenced in Rutshire, the Romances, also known as “the books named after posh girls” – also Imogen and Harriet – were near misses, every male lead feeling like a test-run for Rupert, every main character a little bit weak. Plus, chapter for chapter (I haven’t actually run the numbers), there wasn’t as much sex in them. They were a bit conservative on topics of modesty, women always being anxious that men would think they’re immoral, men saying batshit things about why they favored virgins (comparably, ostensibly, as a real man always wants to be the initial to open a jar of instant coffee). I don’t know if I’d advise reading these books at a formative age. I believed for a while that that is what posh people really thought.

They were, however, extremely well-crafted, high-functioning romances, which is considerably tougher than it seems. You lived Harriet’s surprise baby, Bella’s pissy relatives, Emily’s remote Scottish life – Cooper could transport you from an all-is-lost moment to a windfall of the soul, and you could not once, even in the initial stages, identify how she achieved it. At one moment you’d be chuckling at her highly specific descriptions of the bedding, the next you’d have watery eyes and little understanding how they appeared.

Authorial Advice

Inquired how to be a novelist, Cooper frequently advised the type of guidance that the famous author would have said, if he could have been bothered to assist a aspiring writer: employ all 5 of your perceptions, say how things smelled and seemed and heard and tactile and tasted – it significantly enhances the writing. But likely more helpful was: “Always keep a journal – it’s very difficult, when you’re twenty-five, to recall what age 24 felt like.” That’s one of the initial observations you notice, in the more extensive, more populated books, which have seventeen main characters rather than just one lead, all with very upper-class names, unless they’re Stateside, in which case they’re called Helen. Even an generational gap of four years, between two siblings, between a male and a female, you can hear in the conversation.

A Literary Mystery

The historical account of Riders was so exactly Jilly Cooper it couldn't possibly have been accurate, except it absolutely is factual because a London paper ran an appeal about it at the period: she finished the whole manuscript in 1970, long before the Romances, took it into the downtown and misplaced it on a vehicle. Some texture has been purposely excluded of this story – what, for instance, was so crucial in the city that you would forget the only copy of your manuscript on a bus, which is not that different from abandoning your infant on a railway? Certainly an meeting, but what sort?

Cooper was wont to amp up her own disorder and haplessness