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Jilly Cooper, who left us unexpectedly at the 88 years old, sold 11 million volumes of her assorted grand books over her half-century career in writing. Beloved by all discerning readers over a certain age (mid-forties), she was introduced to a new generation last year with the Disney+ adaptation of Rivals.

The Rutshire Chronicles

Longtime readers would have liked to view the Rutshire chronicles in sequence: beginning with Riders, initially released in 1985, in which the infamous Rupert Campbell-Black, cad, heartbreaker, equestrian, is first introduced. But that’s a sidebar – what was notable about watching Rivals as a box set was how brilliantly Cooper’s world had stood the test of time. The chronicles encapsulated the 1980s: the shoulder pads and puffball skirts; the preoccupation with social class; the upper class disdaining the Technicolored nouveau riche, both ignoring everyone else while they quibbled about how room-temperature their sparkling wine was; the sexual politics, with harassment and abuse so everyday they were virtually characters in their own right, a pair you could rely on to drive the narrative forward.

While Cooper might have lived in this era completely, she was never the classic fish not noticing the ocean because it’s everywhere. She had a humanity and an observational intelligence that you could easily miss from hearing her talk. Everyone, from the canine to the horse to her family to her French exchange’s brother, was always “completely delightful” – unless, that is, they were “completely exquisite”. People got assaulted and more in Cooper’s work, but that was never condoned – it’s remarkable how tolerated it is in many more highbrow books of the time.

Class and Character

She was well-to-do, which for practical purposes meant that her parent had to earn an income, but she’d have described the classes more by their values. The middle-class people anxiously contemplated about all things, all the time – what society might think, mostly – and the upper classes didn’t care a … well “such things”. She was spicy, at times incredibly so, but her language was always refined.

She’d narrate her family life in storybook prose: “Dad went to Dunkirk and Mummy was deeply concerned”. They were both absolutely stunning, participating in a eternal partnership, and this Cooper emulated in her own marriage, to a businessman of war books, Leo Cooper. She was in her mid-twenties, he was twenty-seven, the union wasn’t without hiccups (he was a philanderer), but she was consistently comfortable giving people the secret for a successful union, which is squeaky bed but (key insight), they’re creaking with all the mirth. He avoided reading 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 reciprocated: she wouldn’t be spotted reading battle accounts.

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

Initial Novels

Prudence (the late 70s) was the fifth book in the Romance novels, which began with Emily in 1975. If you came to Cooper in reverse, having begun in her later universe, the Romances, alternatively called “the books named after affluent ladies” – also Imogen and Harriet – were almost there, every hero feeling like a prototype for Rupert, every main character a little bit insipid. Plus, chapter for chapter (I haven’t actually run the numbers), there wasn't the same quantity of sex in them. They were a bit conservative on issues of propriety, women always worrying that men would think they’re promiscuous, men saying outrageous statements about why they preferred virgins (comparably, ostensibly, as a real man always wants to be the initial to open a container of Nescafé). I don’t know if I’d suggest reading these stories at a formative age. I thought for a while that that is what affluent individuals genuinely felt.

They were, however, extremely tightly written, successful romances, which is much harder than it sounds. You experienced Harriet’s surprise baby, Bella’s pissy family-by-marriage, Emily’s loneliness in Scotland – Cooper could take you from an all-is-lost moment to a lottery win of the emotions, and you could never, even in the early days, identify how she did it. Suddenly you’d be chuckling at her meticulously detailed accounts of the sheets, the following moment you’d have emotional response and no idea how they arrived.

Authorial Advice

Inquired how to be a writer, Cooper would often state the type of guidance that Ernest Hemingway would have said, if he could have been bothered to help out a aspiring writer: employ all 5 of your senses, say how things smelled and appeared and sounded and touched and palatable – it really lifts the narrative. But perhaps more practical was: “Constantly keep a journal – it’s very challenging, when you’re 25, to recall what twenty-four felt like.” That’s one of the first things you notice, in the more extensive, densely peopled books, which have 17 heroines rather than just one lead, all with extremely posh names, unless they’re Stateside, in which case they’re called a common name. Even an generational gap of several years, between two siblings, between a gentleman and a woman, you can perceive in the dialogue.

A Literary Mystery

The origin story of Riders was so pitch-perfectly characteristically Cooper it couldn't possibly have been real, except it absolutely is true because London’s Evening Standard ran an appeal about it at the period: she finished the whole manuscript in 1970, prior to the early novels, carried it into the West End and misplaced it on a public transport. Some texture has been deliberately left out of this anecdote – what, for example, was so important in the urban area that you would leave the only copy of your book on a bus, which is not that different from forgetting your child on a train? Undoubtedly an meeting, but what kind?

Cooper was wont to exaggerate her own chaos and ineptitude