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Jilly Cooper, who left us unexpectedly at the 88 years old, racked up sales of 11m copies of her various grand books over her five-decade literary career. Adored by every sensible person over a specific age (forty-five), she was introduced to a new generation last year with the Disney+ adaptation of Rivals.

The Rutshire Chronicles

Cooper purists would have preferred to watch the Rutshire chronicles in chronological order: starting with Riders, first published in the mid-80s, in which the character Rupert Campbell-Black, scoundrel, philanderer, rider, is first introduced. But that’s a sidebar – what was remarkable about viewing Rivals as a box set was how well Cooper’s world had stood the test of time. The chronicles captured the 1980s: the power dressing and voluminous skirts; the fixation on status; the upper class sneering at the ostentatious newly wealthy, both ignoring everyone else while they complained about how room-temperature their sparkling wine was; the intimate power struggles, with unwanted advances and abuse so commonplace they were practically figures in their own right, a duo you could rely on to move the plot along.

While Cooper might have inhabited this age fully, she was never the typical fish not perceiving the ocean because it’s everywhere. She had a humanity and an keen insight that you could easily miss from listening to her speak. Everyone, from the pet to the equine to her parents to her foreign exchange sibling, was always “utterly charming” – unless, that is, they were “truly heavenly”. People got harassed and worse in Cooper’s work, but that was never condoned – it’s surprising how OK it is in many more highbrow books of the era.

Social Strata and Personality

She was affluent middle-class, which for all intents and purposes meant that her parent had to work for a living, but she’d have defined the strata more by their values. The bourgeoisie anxiously contemplated about all things, all the time – what society might think, mostly – and the elite didn’t give a … well “stuff”. She was raunchy, at times incredibly so, but her prose was never coarse.

She’d narrate her family life in idyllic language: “Father went to Dunkirk and Mom was terribly, terribly worried”. They were both completely gorgeous, involved in a eternal partnership, and this Cooper emulated in her own union, to a publisher of war books, Leo Cooper. She was 24, he was twenty-seven, the union wasn’t smooth sailing (he was a bit of a shagger), but she was always confident giving people the recipe for a happy marriage, which is creaking bed springs but (crucial point), they’re squeaking with all the mirth. He never read her books – he read Prudence once, when he had a cold, and said it made him feel unwell. She wasn't bothered, and said it was returned: she wouldn’t be caught reading war chronicles.

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

Initial Novels

Prudence (1978) was the fifth installment in the Romance collection, which commenced with Emily in the mid-70s. If you came to Cooper backwards, having started in her later universe, the early novels, AKA “those ones named after upper-class women” – also Octavia and Harriet – were near misses, every protagonist feeling like a trial version for Rupert, every female lead 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 promiscuous, men saying outrageous statements about why they favored virgins (comparably, apparently, as a true gentleman always wants to be the first to open a jar of instant coffee). I don’t know if I’d recommend reading these stories at a impressionable age. I believed for a while that that was what the upper class actually believed.

They were, however, incredibly precisely constructed, successful romances, which is much harder than it sounds. You experienced Harriet’s surprise baby, Bella’s annoying relatives, Emily’s remote Scottish life – Cooper could take you from an hopeless moment to a jackpot of the soul, and you could never, even in the initial stages, pinpoint how she did it. At one moment you’d be chuckling at her meticulously detailed descriptions of the sheets, the next you’d have watery eyes and little understanding how they appeared.

Authorial Advice

Questioned how to be a author, Cooper would often state the sort of advice that the famous author would have said, if he could have been inclined to assist a aspiring writer: use all five of your perceptions, say how things scented and looked and sounded and felt and flavored – it greatly improves the narrative. But perhaps more practical was: “Always keep a diary – it’s very hard, when you’re mid-twenties, to remember what being 24 felt like.” That’s one of the first things you detect, in the longer, densely peopled books, which have 17 heroines rather than just one lead, all with very upper-class names, unless they’re American, in which case they’re called Helen. Even an age difference of several years, between two relatives, between a male and a lady, you can perceive in the conversation.

A Literary Mystery

The backstory of Riders was so exactly Jilly Cooper it might not have been true, except it definitely is real because a London paper ran an appeal about it at the era: she wrote the whole manuscript in the early 70s, prior to the first books, took it into the city center and left it on a vehicle. Some context has been deliberately left out of this anecdote – what, for instance, was so significant in the West End that you would abandon the sole version of your novel on a public transport, which is not that far from forgetting your baby on a railway? Undoubtedly an rendezvous, but what kind?

Cooper was wont to amp up her own disorder and haplessness