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Jilly Cooper, who passed away unexpectedly at the 88 years of age, achieved sales of 11m copies of her various sweeping books over her half-century writing career. Adored by anyone with any sense over a certain age (45), she was introduced to a modern audience last year with the streaming series adaptation of Rivals.

The Rutshire Chronicles

Devoted fans would have wanted to see the Rutshire chronicles in sequence: starting with Riders, initially released in 1985, in which Rupert Campbell-Black, scoundrel, heartbreaker, rider, is first introduced. But that’s a minor point – what was striking about viewing Rivals as a complete series was how well Cooper’s world had stood the test of time. The chronicles encapsulated the eighties: the power dressing and puffball skirts; the fixation on status; nobility disdaining the ostentatious newly wealthy, both ignoring everyone else while they quibbled about how warm their champagne was; the gender dynamics, with harassment and misconduct so routine they were almost personas in their own right, a double act you could rely on to move the plot along.

While Cooper might have occupied this age completely, she was never the proverbial fish not seeing the ocean because it’s ubiquitous. She had a humanity and an observational intelligence that you might not expect from hearing her talk. Every character, from the canine to the equine to her parents to her international student's relative, was always “completely delightful” – unless, that is, they were “absolutely divine”. People got groped and further in Cooper’s work, but that was never acceptable – it’s astonishing how acceptable it is in many far more literary books of the era.

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 characterized the strata more by their customs. The middle-class people worried about all things, all the time – what other people might think, mainly – and the elite didn’t bother with “nonsense”. She was spicy, at times very much, but her language was always refined.

She’d narrate her childhood in idyllic language: “Dad went to battle and Mother was terribly, terribly worried”. They were both utterly beautiful, participating in a eternal partnership, and this Cooper mirrored in her own partnership, to a editor of historical accounts, Leo Cooper. She was in her mid-twenties, he was twenty-seven, the marriage wasn’t smooth sailing (he was a philanderer), but she was never less than confident giving people the secret for a successful union, which is noisy mattress but (crucial point), they’re noisy with all the laughter. He never read her books – he tried Prudence once, when he had flu, and said it made him feel worse. She didn’t mind, and said it was returned: she wouldn’t be caught reading battle accounts.

Always keep a notebook – it’s very challenging, when you’re mid-twenties, to recall what twenty-four felt like

Initial Novels

Prudence (1978) was the fifth book in the Romance series, which started with Emily in the mid-70s. If you came to Cooper backwards, having begun in the main series, the early novels, alternatively called “the novels named after upper-class women” – also Imogen and Harriet – were near misses, every hero feeling like a prototype for Rupert, 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 uptight on matters of modesty, women always being anxious that men would think they’re promiscuous, men saying batshit things about why they preferred virgins (similarly, apparently, as a true gentleman always wants to be the initial to break a jar of Nescafé). I don’t know if I’d recommend reading these novels at a formative age. I assumed for a while that that is what the upper class genuinely felt.

They were, however, extremely tightly written, effective romances, which is considerably tougher than it appears. You felt Harriet’s unwanted pregnancy, Bella’s difficult relatives, Emily’s remote Scottish life – Cooper could guide you from an all-is-lost moment to a lottery win of the emotions, and you could not once, even in the early days, put your finger on how she achieved it. At one moment you’d be laughing at her meticulously detailed descriptions of the sheets, the following moment you’d have emotional response and little understanding how they appeared.

Authorial Advice

Questioned how to be a author, Cooper would often state the type of guidance that the famous author would have said, if he could have been bothered to guide a aspiring writer: use all all of your senses, say how things scented and looked and audible and felt and flavored – it really lifts the writing. But probably more useful was: “Constantly keep a diary – it’s very challenging, when you’re 25, to recall what twenty-four felt like.” That’s one of the primary realizations you observe, in the more detailed, character-rich books, which have seventeen main characters rather than just one, all with extremely posh names, unless they’re from the US, in which case they’re called a simple moniker. Even an age difference of several years, between two siblings, between a gentleman and a woman, you can detect in the speech.

The Lost Manuscript

The origin story of Riders was so perfectly Jilly Cooper it can’t possibly have been accurate, except it definitely is factual because a London paper published a notice about it at the period: she wrote the complete book in 1970, long before the first books, brought it into the city center and forgot it on a vehicle. Some texture has been deliberately left out of this story – what, for example, was so crucial in the West End that you would abandon the only copy of your manuscript on a train, which is not that different from forgetting your child on a transport? Undoubtedly an rendezvous, but what sort?

Cooper was prone to amp up her own messiness and ineptitude