🔗 Share this article

Jilly Cooper, who died suddenly at the 88 years of age, racked up sales of eleven million books of her many sweeping books over her five-decade writing career. Adored by every sensible person over a particular age (45), she was introduced to a new generation last year with the Disney+ adaptation of Rivals.

Cooper's Fictional Universe

Longtime readers would have preferred to watch the Rutshire chronicles in order: starting with Riders, first published in the mid-80s, in which the infamous Rupert Campbell-Black, cad, heartbreaker, rider, is debuts. But that’s a minor point – what was striking about seeing Rivals as a box set was how well Cooper’s fictional realm had remained relevant. The chronicles distilled the 1980s: the broad shoulders and voluminous skirts; the preoccupation with social class; the upper class looking down on the ostentatious newly wealthy, both overlooking everyone else while they snipped about how room-temperature their bubbly was; the intimate power struggles, with unwanted advances and assault so routine they were almost characters in their own right, a pair you could count on to move the plot along.

While Cooper might have occupied this era fully, she was never the typical fish not seeing the ocean because it’s all around. She had a compassion and an keen insight that you might not expect from her public persona. Every character, from the dog to the equine to her family to her French exchange’s brother, was always “utterly charming” – unless, that is, they were “absolutely divine”. People got groped and more in Cooper’s work, but that was never OK – it’s remarkable how OK it is in many more highbrow books of the time.

Background and Behavior

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 bourgeoisie fretted about all things, all the time – what society might think, mostly – and the aristocracy didn’t care a … well “nonsense”. She was spicy, at times incredibly so, but her language was never coarse.

She’d narrate her upbringing in storybook prose: “Daddy went to Dunkirk and Mother was deeply concerned”. They were both absolutely stunning, participating in a lifelong love match, and this Cooper emulated in her own partnership, to a publisher of military histories, Leo Cooper. She was twenty-four, he was in his late twenties, the union wasn’t perfect (he was a bit of a shagger), but she was never less than comfortable giving people the formula for a successful union, which is squeaky bed but (crucial point), they’re creaking with all the joy. He never read her books – he tried Prudence once, when he had influenza, and said it made him feel unwell. She didn’t mind, and said it was reciprocated: she wouldn’t be spotted reading military history.

Always keep a journal – it’s very challenging, when you’re twenty-five, to recall what age 24 felt like

Initial Novels

Prudence (1978) was the fifth book in the Romance novels, which commenced with Emily in 1975. If you discovered Cooper from the later works, having begun in Rutshire, the Romances, AKA “the novels named after upper-class women” – also Bella and Harriet – were close but no cigar, every protagonist feeling like a trial version for Rupert, every main character a little bit drippy. Plus, chapter for chapter (I can't verify statistically), there was less sex in them. They were a bit reserved on issues of propriety, women always being anxious that men would think they’re immoral, men saying outrageous statements about why they preferred virgins (comparably, ostensibly, as a genuine guy always wants to be the first to unseal a tin of coffee). I don’t know if I’d advise reading these books at a formative age. I believed for a while that that was what the upper class actually believed.

They were, however, remarkably well-crafted, effective romances, which is much harder than it sounds. You experienced Harriet’s unwanted pregnancy, Bella’s annoying relatives, Emily’s loneliness in Scotland – Cooper could take you from an all-is-lost moment to a jackpot of the soul, and you could never, even in the early days, pinpoint how she did it. One minute you’d be chuckling at her meticulously detailed accounts of the sheets, the following moment you’d have watery eyes and uncertainty how they appeared.

Literary Guidance

Questioned how to be a writer, Cooper used to say the sort of advice that Ernest Hemingway would have said, if he could have been bothered to guide a aspiring writer: use all five of your perceptions, say how things aromatic and looked and sounded and felt and flavored – it significantly enhances the prose. But probably more useful was: “Constantly keep a notebook – it’s very challenging, when you’re twenty-five, to remember what being 24 felt like.” That’s one of the initial observations you notice, in the longer, more populated books, which have numerous female leads rather than just one, all with extremely posh names, unless they’re Stateside, in which case they’re called a common name. Even an years apart of a few years, between two sisters, between a man and a female, you can detect in the conversation.

The Lost Manuscript

The backstory of Riders was so pitch-perfectly characteristically Cooper it can’t possibly have been true, except it absolutely is true because a London paper ran an appeal about it at the era: she finished the entire draft in the early 70s, well before the early novels, brought it into the city center and left it on a bus. Some detail has been purposely excluded of this anecdote – what, for case, was so important in the urban area that you would leave the unique draft of your book on a bus, which is not that far from forgetting your child on a train? Undoubtedly an assignation, but what sort?

Cooper was inclined to embellish her own disorder and ineptitude