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Jilly Cooper, who died suddenly at the 88 years of age, achieved sales of 11m volumes of her various grand books over her 50-year literary career. Cherished by anyone with any sense over a specific age (forty-five), she was brought to a younger audience last year with the Disney+ adaptation of Rivals.

Cooper's Fictional Universe

Longtime readers would have liked to watch the Rutshire chronicles in sequence: starting with Riders, first published in the mid-80s, in which the character Rupert Campbell-Black, scoundrel, philanderer, equestrian, is initially presented. But that’s a side note – what was striking about watching Rivals as a binge-watch was how effectively Cooper’s universe had aged. The chronicles encapsulated the 1980s: the power dressing and puffball skirts; the fixation on status; the upper class disdaining the flashy new money, both overlooking everyone else while they snipped about how lukewarm their sparkling wine was; the intimate power struggles, with inappropriate behavior and abuse so routine they were almost characters in their own right, a double act you could rely on to move the plot along.

While Cooper might have lived in this age totally, she was never the proverbial fish not perceiving the ocean because it’s all around. She had a compassion and an observational intelligence that you might not expect from her public persona. Every character, from the canine to the pony to her family to her foreign exchange sibling, was always “absolutely sweet” – unless, that is, they were “completely exquisite”. People got groped and worse in Cooper’s work, but that was never acceptable – it’s surprising how acceptable it is in many far more literary books of the time.

Background and Behavior

She was upper-middle-class, which for practical purposes meant that her dad had to hold down a job, but she’d have defined the strata more by their values. The middle classes anxiously contemplated about every little detail, all the time – what society might think, mainly – and the aristocracy didn’t care a … well “such things”. She was risqué, at times very much, but her dialogue was always refined.

She’d recount her childhood in fairytale terms: “Daddy went to the war and Mom was terribly, terribly worried”. They were both completely gorgeous, engaged in a eternal partnership, and this Cooper emulated in her own partnership, to a businessman of historical accounts, Leo Cooper. She was in her mid-twenties, he was 27, the marriage wasn’t perfect (he was a unfaithful type), but she was always at ease giving people the secret for a blissful partnership, which is squeaky bed but (crucial point), they’re squeaking with all the mirth. He didn't read her books – he picked up Prudence once, when he had influenza, and said it made him feel worse. She took no offense, and said it was returned: she wouldn’t be caught reading military history.

Forever keep a notebook – it’s very hard, when you’re twenty-five, to remember what twenty-four felt like

Early Works

Prudence (1978) was the fifth book in the Romance series, which began with Emily in 1975. If you discovered Cooper backwards, having started in her later universe, the Romances, also known as “the novels named after upper-class women” – also Octavia and Harriet – were near misses, every protagonist feeling like a trial version for Campbell-Black, every female lead a little bit drippy. Plus, page for page (I can't verify statistically), there wasn’t as much sex in them. They were a bit conservative on topics of modesty, women always worrying that men would think they’re loose, men saying outrageous statements about why they liked virgins (similarly, seemingly, as a real man always wants to be the first to unseal a container of Nescafé). I don’t know if I’d recommend reading these stories at a formative age. I assumed for a while that that’s what affluent individuals genuinely felt.

They were, however, extremely tightly written, effective romances, which is much harder than it appears. You experienced Harriet’s unwanted pregnancy, Bella’s difficult in-laws, Emily’s loneliness in Scotland – Cooper could take you from an all-is-lost moment to a jackpot of the heart, and you could not ever, even in the early days, pinpoint how she achieved it. At one moment you’d be laughing at her highly specific descriptions of the bedding, the following moment you’d have tears in your eyes and little understanding how they appeared.

Writing Wisdom

Questioned how to be a author, Cooper would often state the kind of thing that the literary giant would have said, if he could have been bothered to help out a beginner: use all five of your perceptions, say how things smelled and seemed and heard and tactile and tasted – it really lifts the writing. But perhaps more practical was: “Always keep a journal – it’s very challenging, when you’re twenty-five, to recollect what age 24 felt like.” That’s one of the initial observations you observe, in the more detailed, character-rich books, which have 17 heroines rather than just a single protagonist, all with decidedly aristocratic names, unless they’re from the US, in which case they’re called Helen. Even an age difference of several years, between two siblings, between a male and a female, you can detect in the dialogue.

The Lost Manuscript

The historical account of Riders was so perfectly characteristically Cooper it couldn't possibly have been real, except it certainly was factual because a London paper published a notice about it at the period: she wrote the entire draft in the early 70s, well before the first books, brought it into the city center and misplaced it on a vehicle. Some detail has been deliberately left out of this anecdote – what, for instance, was so significant in the West End that you would leave the only copy of your manuscript on a public transport, which is not that different from leaving your baby on a train? Surely an assignation, but what sort?

Cooper was wont to embellish her own chaos and ineptitude