🔗 Share this article

The beloved novelist Jilly Cooper, who died suddenly at the 88 years of age, sold eleven million books of her various grand books over her half-century writing career. Adored by anyone with any sense over a specific age (mid-forties), she was brought to a modern audience last year with the TV adaptation of Rivals.

The Rutshire Chronicles

Longtime readers would have liked to watch the Rutshire chronicles in chronological order: commencing with Riders, originally published in 1985, in which the character Rupert Campbell-Black, cad, philanderer, equestrian, is initially presented. But that’s a sidebar – what was remarkable about viewing Rivals as a box set was how effectively Cooper’s world had remained relevant. The chronicles encapsulated the eighties: the broad shoulders and voluminous skirts; the fixation on status; aristocrats sneering at the ostentatious newly wealthy, both ignoring everyone else while they complained about how room-temperature their bubbly was; the sexual politics, with unwanted advances and misconduct so routine they were almost personas in their own right, a double act you could count on to drive the narrative forward.

While Cooper might have occupied this era totally, she was never the proverbial fish not noticing the ocean because it’s ubiquitous. She had a empathy and an observational intelligence that you could easily miss from her public persona. Everyone, from the dog to the pony to her parents to her foreign exchange sibling, was always “completely delightful” – unless, that is, they were “truly heavenly”. People got groped and more in Cooper’s work, but that was never OK – it’s astonishing how tolerated it is in many supposedly sophisticated books of the era.

Class and Character

She was upper-middle-class, which for practical purposes meant that her parent had to hold down a job, but she’d have characterized the social classes more by their values. The middle classes fretted about all things, all the time – what other people might think, mostly – and the aristocracy didn’t care a … well “such things”. She was raunchy, at times very much, but her dialogue was always refined.

She’d recount her upbringing in idyllic language: “Daddy went to battle and Mummy was terribly, terribly worried”. They were both utterly beautiful, involved in a enduring romance, and this Cooper replicated in her own union, to a editor of military histories, Leo Cooper. She was 24, he was in his late twenties, the marriage wasn’t smooth sailing (he was a philanderer), but she was always comfortable giving people the formula for a successful union, which is noisy mattress but (key insight), they’re creaking with all the laughter. 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 mutual: she wouldn’t be caught reading military history.

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

Early Works

Prudence (1978) was the fifth volume in the Romance series, which started with Emily in 1975. If you discovered Cooper in reverse, having started in Rutshire, the Romances, AKA “the books named after affluent ladies” – also Imogen and Harriet – were near misses, every protagonist feeling like a test-run for Rupert, every main character a little bit weak. Plus, page for page (Without exact data), there wasn't the same quantity of sex in them. They were a bit uptight on issues of decorum, women always being anxious that men would think they’re loose, men saying ridiculous comments about why they liked virgins (comparably, ostensibly, as a true gentleman always wants to be the initial to unseal a tin of Nescafé). I don’t know if I’d suggest reading these books at a impressionable age. I assumed for a while that that is what affluent individuals really thought.

They were, however, remarkably precisely constructed, effective romances, which is far more difficult than it appears. You experienced Harriet’s surprise baby, Bella’s annoying in-laws, Emily’s remote Scottish life – Cooper could take you from an hopeless moment to a lottery win of the emotions, and you could not once, even in the initial stages, identify how she achieved it. At one moment you’d be smiling at her highly specific depictions of the sheets, the next you’d have watery eyes and no idea how they arrived.

Literary Guidance

Questioned how to be a novelist, Cooper used to say the kind of thing that the literary giant would have said, if he could have been arsed to assist a beginner: utilize all five of your faculties, say how things smelled and looked and audible and touched and palatable – it really lifts the narrative. But probably more useful was: “Constantly keep a journal – it’s very hard, when you’re 25, to recollect what being 24 felt like.” That’s one of the initial observations you observe, in the more extensive, densely peopled books, which have seventeen main characters rather than just a single protagonist, all with decidedly aristocratic names, unless they’re Stateside, in which case they’re called a simple moniker. Even an age difference of four years, between two relatives, between a man and a lady, you can hear in the conversation.

An Author's Tale

The origin story of Riders was so perfectly characteristically Cooper it couldn't possibly have been accurate, except it absolutely is true because London’s Evening Standard published a notice about it at the era: she finished the entire draft in 1970, prior to the first books, brought it into the downtown and left it on a bus. Some detail has been deliberately left out of this story – what, for example, was so significant in the West End that you would leave the only copy of your manuscript on a bus, which is not that far from abandoning your baby on a railway? Surely an rendezvous, but what sort?

Cooper was wont to amp up her own disorder and ineptitude