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The beloved novelist Jilly Cooper, who died suddenly at the 88 years old, racked up sales of 11m books of her assorted sweeping books over her five-decade career in writing. Beloved by anyone with any sense over a particular age (45), she was presented to a new generation last year with the TV adaptation of Rivals.

Cooper's Fictional Universe

Cooper purists would have wanted to see the Rutshire chronicles in sequence: commencing with Riders, first published in 1985, in which the character Rupert Campbell-Black, cad, heartbreaker, rider, is debuts. But that’s a minor point – what was striking about viewing Rivals as a binge-watch was how effectively Cooper’s fictional realm had aged. The chronicles captured the 1980s: the power dressing and voluminous skirts; the fixation on status; aristocrats sneering at the ostentatious newly wealthy, both ignoring everyone else while they quibbled about how room-temperature their champagne was; the gender dynamics, with harassment and abuse so commonplace they were virtually figures in their own right, a duo you could trust to move the plot along.

While Cooper might have occupied this age completely, she was never the typical fish not noticing the ocean because it’s ubiquitous. She had a empathy and an keen insight that you maybe wouldn’t guess from listening to her speak. All her creations, from the canine to the horse to her mother and father to her French exchange’s brother, was always “absolutely sweet” – unless, that is, they were “absolutely divine”. People got assaulted and further in Cooper’s work, but that was never OK – it’s surprising how tolerated it is in many far more literary books of the time.

Social Strata and Personality

She was upper-middle-class, which for real-world terms meant that her parent had to hold down a job, but she’d have defined the classes more by their mores. The middle classes anxiously contemplated about everything, all the time – what others might think, mainly – 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 childhood in storybook prose: “Father went to Dunkirk and Mother was extremely anxious”. They were both completely gorgeous, engaged in a eternal partnership, and this Cooper replicated in her own partnership, to a publisher of war books, Leo Cooper. She was 24, he was in his late twenties, the marriage wasn’t smooth sailing (he was a philanderer), but she was consistently at ease giving people the formula for a blissful partnership, which is noisy mattress but (key insight), they’re creaking with all the laughter. He avoided reading her books – he tried Prudence once, when he had influenza, and said it made him feel unwell. She wasn't bothered, and said it was returned: she wouldn’t be seen dead reading military history.

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

The Romance Series

Prudence (1978) was the fifth installment in the Romance novels, which commenced with Emily in 1975. If you approached Cooper from the later works, having begun in the main series, the early novels, also known as “those ones named after posh girls” – also Imogen and Harriet – were near misses, every male lead feeling like a trial version for Rupert, every heroine a little bit insipid. Plus, line for line (I haven’t actually run the numbers), there wasn't the same quantity of sex in them. They were a bit reserved on topics of decorum, women always worrying that men would think they’re promiscuous, men saying outrageous statements about why they liked virgins (similarly, apparently, as a true gentleman always wants to be the initial to open a container of coffee). I don’t know if I’d suggest reading these novels at a impressionable age. I assumed for a while that that is what posh people genuinely felt.

They were, however, remarkably precisely constructed, high-functioning romances, which is much harder than it appears. You felt Harriet’s unplanned pregnancy, Bella’s pissy family-by-marriage, Emily’s Scottish isolation – Cooper could transport you from an desperate moment to a windfall of the emotions, and you could never, even in the early days, identify how she achieved it. At one moment you’d be laughing at her highly specific descriptions of the sheets, the subsequently you’d have tears in your eyes and little understanding how they got there.

Literary Guidance

Questioned how to be a writer, Cooper used to say the sort of advice that the famous author would have said, if he could have been bothered to guide a novice: use all all of your perceptions, say how things scented and appeared and audible and felt and tasted – it significantly enhances the writing. But probably more useful was: “Forever keep a journal – it’s very challenging, when you’re mid-twenties, to recall what being 24 felt like.” That’s one of the initial observations you observe, in the longer, character-rich books, which have 17 heroines rather than just one lead, all with very upper-class names, unless they’re from the US, in which case they’re called a common name. Even an age difference of four years, between two sisters, between a male and a lady, you can detect in the dialogue.

A Literary Mystery

The backstory of Riders was so perfectly Jilly Cooper it can’t possibly have been true, except it definitely is real because London’s Evening Standard published a notice about it at the time: she wrote the entire draft in the early 70s, prior to the first books, brought it into the downtown and left it on a public transport. Some context has been intentionally omitted of this anecdote – what, for instance, was so important in the urban area that you would forget the only copy of your manuscript on a train, which is not that far from abandoning your infant on a train? Undoubtedly an meeting, but what sort?

Cooper was prone to amp up her own chaos and ineptitude