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Jilly Cooper, who died suddenly at the 88 years of age, sold 11m volumes of her various sweeping books over her five-decade literary career. Beloved by anyone with any sense over a particular age (mid-forties), she was presented to a new generation last year with the streaming series adaptation of Rivals.

The Rutshire Chronicles

Cooper purists would have preferred to watch the Rutshire chronicles in sequence: starting with Riders, originally published in 1985, in which the infamous Rupert Campbell-Black, rogue, charmer, horse rider, is initially presented. But that’s a minor point – what was notable about watching Rivals as a complete series was how effectively Cooper’s fictional realm had stood the test of time. The chronicles distilled the eighties: the shoulder pads and puffball skirts; the obsession with class; the upper class disdaining the Technicolored nouveau riche, both overlooking everyone else while they snipped about how room-temperature their champagne was; the intimate power struggles, with unwanted advances and abuse so commonplace they were almost figures in their own right, a duo you could count on to move the plot along.

While Cooper might have occupied this age fully, she was never the proverbial fish not seeing the ocean because it’s everywhere. She had a compassion and an observational intelligence that you could easily miss from her public persona. Every character, from the pet to the equine to her mother and father to her foreign exchange sibling, was always “completely delightful” – unless, that is, they were “completely exquisite”. People got assaulted and more in Cooper’s work, but that was never OK – it’s remarkable how acceptable it is in many far more literary books of the period.

Class and Character

She was well-to-do, which for practical purposes meant that her father had to work for a living, but she’d have described the social classes more by their mores. The middle classes worried about every little detail, all the time – what society might think, mainly – and the elite didn’t care a … well “nonsense”. She was raunchy, at times extremely, but her language was always refined.

She’d describe her childhood in storybook prose: “Father went to battle and Mummy was deeply concerned”. They were both utterly beautiful, engaged in a enduring romance, and this Cooper emulated in her own marriage, to a publisher of historical accounts, Leo Cooper. She was 24, he was twenty-seven, the relationship wasn’t smooth sailing (he was a bit of a shagger), but she was never less than at ease giving people the secret for a blissful partnership, which is squeaky bed but (big reveal), they’re squeaking with all the joy. He never read her books – he picked up Prudence once, when he had flu, and said it made him feel unwell. She took no offense, and said it was mutual: she wouldn’t be caught reading battle accounts.

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

Initial Novels

Prudence (1978) was the fifth book in the Romance collection, which commenced with Emily in 1975. If you discovered Cooper backwards, having started in the main series, the Romances, alternatively called “the books named after affluent ladies” – also Octavia and Harriet – were near misses, every male lead feeling like a prototype for Campbell-Black, every heroine a little bit drippy. Plus, page for page (I can't verify statistically), there wasn't the same quantity of sex in them. They were a bit uptight on issues of decorum, women always being anxious that men would think they’re loose, men saying batshit things about why they liked virgins (in much the same way, seemingly, as a true gentleman always wants to be the initial to break a tin of Nescafé). I don’t know if I’d recommend reading these novels at a formative age. I assumed for a while that that is what the upper class actually believed.

They were, however, remarkably tightly written, effective romances, which is considerably tougher than it sounds. You lived Harriet’s unplanned pregnancy, Bella’s annoying family-by-marriage, Emily’s loneliness in Scotland – Cooper could guide you from an desperate moment to a windfall of the soul, and you could not once, even in the beginning, identify how she achieved it. Suddenly you’d be smiling at her highly specific accounts of the bed linen, the subsequently you’d have tears in your eyes and uncertainty how they appeared.

Authorial Advice

Questioned how to be a writer, Cooper frequently advised the sort of advice that Ernest Hemingway would have said, if he could have been arsed to guide a aspiring writer: utilize all 5 of your perceptions, say how things scented and looked and sounded and tactile and palatable – it greatly improves the narrative. But perhaps more practical was: “Always keep a journal – it’s very hard, when you’re mid-twenties, to remember what age 24 felt like.” That’s one of the first things you notice, in the more detailed, more populated books, which have 17 heroines rather than just one, all with very upper-class names, unless they’re Stateside, in which case they’re called Helen. Even an generational gap of a few years, between two sisters, between a male and a lady, you can detect in the speech.

The Lost Manuscript

The historical account of Riders was so pitch-perfectly Jilly Cooper it might not have been true, except it definitely is true because a London paper made a public request about it at the era: she finished the whole manuscript in 1970, prior to the first books, took it into the downtown and left it on a public transport. Some context has been purposely excluded of this anecdote – what, for example, was so important in the West End that you would forget the sole version of your manuscript on a train, which is not that far from forgetting your infant on a railway? Certainly an rendezvous, but what sort?

Cooper was inclined to embellish her own messiness and clumsiness