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Jilly Cooper, who left us unexpectedly at the 88 years old, racked up sales of 11 million books of her assorted epic books over her half-century literary career. Beloved by anyone with any sense over a particular age (45), she was brought to a modern audience last year with the TV adaptation of Rivals.

Cooper's Fictional Universe

Devoted fans would have wanted to watch the Rutshire chronicles in order: commencing with Riders, originally published in 1985, in which the character Rupert Campbell-Black, cad, charmer, equestrian, is initially presented. But that’s a minor point – what was remarkable about viewing Rivals as a binge-watch was how brilliantly Cooper’s fictional realm had stood the test of time. The chronicles captured the eighties: the broad shoulders and puffball skirts; the fixation on status; aristocrats sneering at the Technicolored nouveau riche, both dismissing everyone else while they quibbled about how lukewarm their bubbly was; the intimate power struggles, with unwanted advances and misconduct so everyday they were almost personas in their own right, a pair you could trust to move the plot along.

While Cooper might have lived in this period completely, she was never the typical fish not perceiving the ocean because it’s ubiquitous. She had a humanity and an keen insight that you might not expect from listening to her speak. Everyone, from the dog to the pony to her parents 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 astonishing how acceptable it is in many supposedly sophisticated books of the period.

Class and Character

She was well-to-do, which for real-world terms meant that her dad had to earn an income, but she’d have described the social classes more by their customs. The middle classes worried about all things, all the time – what society might think, mainly – and the upper classes didn’t care a … well “nonsense”. She was raunchy, at times extremely, but her prose was never vulgar.

She’d recount her family life in storybook prose: “Dad went to the war and Mummy was deeply concerned”. They were both utterly beautiful, engaged in a eternal partnership, and this Cooper mirrored in her own partnership, to a editor of war books, Leo Cooper. She was twenty-four, he was 27, the union wasn’t perfect (he was a unfaithful type), but she was always confident giving people the formula for a successful union, which is creaking bed springs but (key insight), they’re noisy with all the joy. He never read her books – he picked up Prudence once, when he had flu, and said it made him feel worse. She didn’t mind, and said it was reciprocated: she wouldn’t be spotted reading battle accounts.

Constantly keep a diary – it’s very difficult, when you’re mid-twenties, to recall what twenty-four felt like

Initial Novels

Prudence (1978) was the fifth installment in the Romance collection, which started with Emily in 1975. If you came to Cooper from the later works, having commenced in the main series, the early novels, alternatively called “the novels named after posh girls” – also Octavia and Harriet – were almost there, every protagonist feeling like a trial version for Campbell-Black, every main character a little bit drippy. Plus, chapter for chapter (I can't verify statistically), there wasn't the same quantity of sex in them. They were a bit conservative on topics of modesty, women always being anxious that men would think they’re promiscuous, men saying batshit things about why they liked virgins (comparably, apparently, as a real man always wants to be the primary to unseal a container of instant coffee). I don’t know if I’d advise reading these books at a impressionable age. I thought for a while that that’s what posh people really thought.

They were, however, remarkably well-crafted, high-functioning romances, which is much harder than it sounds. You felt Harriet’s surprise baby, Bella’s difficult relatives, Emily’s remote Scottish life – Cooper could guide you from an hopeless moment to a lottery win of the soul, and you could not once, even in the initial stages, put your finger on how she achieved it. One minute you’d be smiling at her incredibly close accounts of the sheets, the following moment you’d have emotional response and uncertainty how they appeared.

Authorial Advice

Questioned how to be a novelist, Cooper frequently advised the sort of advice that Ernest Hemingway would have said, if he could have been inclined to help out a aspiring writer: employ all five of your perceptions, say how things scented and looked and heard and touched and palatable – it really lifts the narrative. But probably more useful was: “Forever keep a journal – it’s very challenging, when you’re 25, to remember what age 24 felt like.” That’s one of the initial observations you notice, in the more extensive, densely peopled books, which have seventeen main characters rather than just one lead, all with decidedly aristocratic names, unless they’re American, in which case they’re called a common name. Even an generational gap of four years, between two relatives, between a gentleman and a female, you can hear in the speech.

An Author's Tale

The backstory of Riders was so pitch-perfectly characteristically Cooper it couldn't possibly have been accurate, except it absolutely is true because London’s Evening Standard ran an appeal about it at the period: she wrote the whole manuscript in 1970, well before the Romances, brought it into the city center and misplaced it on a vehicle. Some detail has been deliberately left out of this story – what, for case, was so significant in the city that you would abandon the unique draft of your manuscript on a bus, which is not that unlike abandoning your child on a railway? Surely an meeting, but what sort?

Cooper was prone to embellish her own disorder and haplessness