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The celebrated author Jilly Cooper, who left us unexpectedly at the 88 years of age, achieved sales of eleven million volumes of her many grand books over her five-decade career in writing. Adored by anyone with any sense over a certain age (mid-forties), she was introduced to a new generation last year with the streaming series adaptation of Rivals.

Cooper's Fictional Universe

Devoted fans would have preferred to see the Rutshire chronicles in chronological order: starting with Riders, initially released in 1985, in which the character Rupert Campbell-Black, cad, charmer, equestrian, is initially presented. 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 eighties: the shoulder pads and voluminous skirts; the obsession with class; aristocrats disdaining the flashy new money, both overlooking everyone else while they quibbled about how lukewarm their champagne was; the gender dynamics, with harassment and assault so commonplace they were virtually personas in their own right, a duo you could trust to drive the narrative forward.

While Cooper might have inhabited this age completely, she was never the classic fish not perceiving the ocean because it’s ubiquitous. She had a humanity and an keen insight that you maybe wouldn’t guess from hearing her talk. All her creations, from the canine to the horse to her mother and father to her international student's relative, was always “completely delightful” – unless, that is, they were “completely exquisite”. People got groped and worse in Cooper’s work, but that was never condoned – it’s remarkable how OK it is in many supposedly sophisticated books of the era.

Class and Character

She was affluent middle-class, which for all intents and purposes meant that her dad had to work for a living, but she’d have defined the social classes more by their mores. The middle-class people fretted about every little detail, all the time – what others might think, mainly – and the elite didn’t care a … well “such things”. She was raunchy, at times very much, but her language was never vulgar.

She’d recount her family life in idyllic language: “Father went to battle and Mom was terribly, terribly worried”. They were both utterly beautiful, engaged in a enduring romance, and this Cooper replicated in her own union, to a publisher of historical accounts, Leo Cooper. She was in her mid-twenties, he was 27, the union wasn’t smooth sailing (he was a unfaithful type), but she was always confident giving people the secret for a blissful partnership, which is creaking bed springs but (big reveal), they’re creaking with all the joy. He avoided reading her books – he tried Prudence once, when he had flu, and said it made him feel worse. She didn’t mind, and said it was mutual: she wouldn’t be seen dead reading war chronicles.

Always keep a notebook – it’s very difficult, when you’re twenty-five, to remember what being 24 felt like

The Romance Series

Prudence (the late 70s) was the fifth book in the Romance collection, which began with Emily in the mid-70s. If you discovered Cooper backwards, having begun in her later universe, the early novels, also known as “the novels named after affluent ladies” – also Octavia and Harriet – were close but no cigar, every male lead feeling like a test-run for Campbell-Black, every female lead a little bit weak. Plus, line for line (I haven’t actually run the numbers), there was less sex in them. They were a bit conservative on matters of decorum, women always being anxious that men would think they’re loose, men saying outrageous statements about why they liked virgins (similarly, apparently, as a genuine guy always wants to be the initial to break a tin of coffee). I don’t know if I’d recommend reading these stories at a formative age. I thought for a while that that is what the upper class actually believed.

They were, however, remarkably well-crafted, high-functioning romances, which is much harder than it seems. You experienced Harriet’s unwanted pregnancy, Bella’s annoying in-laws, Emily’s remote Scottish life – Cooper could transport you from an hopeless moment to a windfall of the emotions, and you could not once, even in the beginning, pinpoint how she achieved it. Suddenly you’d be chuckling at her incredibly close depictions of the sheets, the next you’d have emotional response and no idea how they got there.

Authorial Advice

Asked how to be a novelist, Cooper used to say the sort of advice that Ernest Hemingway would have said, if he could have been bothered to guide a beginner: utilize all five of your faculties, say how things smelled and seemed and heard and felt and flavored – it significantly enhances the prose. But likely more helpful was: “Forever keep a diary – it’s very hard, when you’re twenty-five, to recall what being 24 felt like.” That’s one of the initial observations you detect, in the more extensive, densely peopled books, which have numerous female leads rather than just a single protagonist, all with very upper-class names, unless they’re American, in which case they’re called a simple moniker. Even an years apart of a few years, between two sisters, between a gentleman and a woman, you can hear in the conversation.

A Literary Mystery

The historical account of Riders was so exactly Jilly Cooper it might not have been accurate, except it absolutely is factual because a major newspaper made a public request about it at the era: she wrote the entire draft in 1970, long before the early novels, carried it into the downtown and left it on a vehicle. Some context has been intentionally omitted of this story – what, for example, was so crucial in the city that you would forget the sole version of your novel on a bus, which is not that far from abandoning your infant on a railway? Surely an assignation, but what kind?

Cooper was wont to amp up her own messiness and ineptitude