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The celebrated author Jilly Cooper, who died suddenly at the age of 88, racked up sales of 11 million volumes of her various grand books over her half-century writing career. Beloved by anyone with any sense over a particular age (forty-five), she was presented to a younger audience last year with the streaming series adaptation of Rivals.

The Rutshire Chronicles

Devoted fans would have wanted to watch the Rutshire chronicles in order: commencing with Riders, first published in 1985, in which the infamous Rupert Campbell-Black, rogue, charmer, horse rider, is debuts. But that’s a minor point – what was remarkable about seeing Rivals as a binge-watch was how effectively Cooper’s universe had remained relevant. The chronicles captured the eighties: the shoulder pads and voluminous skirts; the preoccupation with social class; aristocrats sneering at the Technicolored nouveau riche, both dismissing everyone else while they quibbled about how warm their bubbly was; the sexual politics, with unwanted advances and assault so everyday they were virtually figures in their own right, a pair you could count on to move the plot along.

While Cooper might have lived in this age fully, she was never the typical fish not perceiving the ocean because it’s everywhere. She had a empathy and an observational intelligence that you maybe wouldn’t guess from listening to her speak. All her creations, from the dog to the equine to her mother and father to her international student's relative, was always “utterly charming” – unless, that is, they were “absolutely divine”. People got harassed and more in Cooper’s work, but that was never acceptable – it’s surprising how OK it is in many more highbrow books of the time.

Class and Character

She was well-to-do, which for real-world terms meant that her dad had to hold down a job, but she’d have defined the strata more by their mores. The bourgeoisie fretted about all things, all the time – what others might think, primarily – and the upper classes didn’t bother with “nonsense”. She was spicy, at times extremely, but her dialogue was always refined.

She’d narrate her family life in fairytale terms: “Dad went to the war and Mummy was terribly, terribly worried”. They were both absolutely stunning, involved in a eternal partnership, and this Cooper replicated in her own marriage, to a businessman of war books, Leo Cooper. She was in her mid-twenties, he was in his late twenties, the union wasn’t smooth sailing (he was a bit of a shagger), but she was always comfortable giving people the secret for a happy marriage, which is noisy mattress but (crucial point), they’re noisy with all the joy. He never read her books – he read Prudence once, when he had a cold, and said it made him feel unwell. She took no offense, and said it was reciprocated: she wouldn’t be caught reading war chronicles.

Constantly keep a journal – it’s very difficult, when you’re 25, to recall what age 24 felt like

Early Works

Prudence (1978) was the fifth installment in the Romance series, which began with Emily in 1975. If you approached Cooper in reverse, having commenced in her later universe, the initial books, AKA “the books named after upper-class women” – also Octavia and Harriet – were almost there, every hero feeling like a test-run for Rupert, every heroine a little bit insipid. Plus, line for line (Without exact data), 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 promiscuous, men saying outrageous statements about why they preferred virgins (similarly, apparently, as a genuine guy always wants to be the first to open a jar of instant coffee). I don’t know if I’d recommend reading these books at a young age. I assumed for a while that that is what the upper class really thought.

They were, however, incredibly tightly written, high-functioning romances, which is considerably tougher than it appears. You lived Harriet’s unwanted pregnancy, Bella’s annoying relatives, Emily’s loneliness in Scotland – Cooper could guide you from an hopeless moment to a jackpot of the soul, and you could never, even in the initial stages, pinpoint how she managed it. One minute you’d be smiling at her highly specific depictions of the sheets, the following moment you’d have tears in your eyes and uncertainty how they appeared.

Writing Wisdom

Questioned how to be a author, Cooper used to say the kind of thing that Ernest Hemingway would have said, if he could have been inclined to guide a beginner: employ all all of your faculties, say how things smelled and appeared and audible and tactile and flavored – it greatly improves the prose. But probably more useful was: “Always keep a diary – it’s very difficult, when you’re 25, to recall what twenty-four felt like.” That’s one of the initial observations you detect, in the more detailed, more populated books, which have 17 heroines rather than just one lead, all with decidedly aristocratic names, unless they’re Stateside, in which case they’re called a simple moniker. Even an generational gap of a few years, between two relatives, between a man and a lady, you can hear in the dialogue.

An Author's Tale

The backstory of Riders was so pitch-perfectly typical of the author it couldn't possibly have been real, except it definitely is real because a London paper ran an appeal about it at the time: she finished the whole manuscript in 1970, prior to the first books, carried it into the West End and forgot it on a bus. Some context has been intentionally omitted of this anecdote – what, for case, was so significant in the urban area that you would abandon the sole version of your book on a train, which is not that far from leaving your baby on a railway? Surely an meeting, but what sort?

Cooper was inclined to amp up her own messiness and haplessness