🔗 Share this article

The beloved novelist Jilly Cooper, who died suddenly at the 88 years of age, racked up sales of 11 million volumes of her various sweeping books over her 50-year literary career. Adored by anyone with any sense over a specific age (mid-forties), she was introduced to a modern audience last year with the streaming series adaptation of Rivals.

The Rutshire Chronicles

Cooper purists would have liked to view the Rutshire chronicles in chronological order: commencing with Riders, originally published in the mid-80s, in which Rupert Campbell-Black, scoundrel, charmer, rider, is initially presented. But that’s a side note – what was notable about watching Rivals as a complete series was how brilliantly Cooper’s world had remained relevant. The chronicles captured the eighties: the broad shoulders and voluminous skirts; the obsession with class; aristocrats disdaining the flashy new money, both ignoring everyone else while they quibbled about how lukewarm their sparkling wine was; the intimate power struggles, with unwanted advances and assault so routine they were almost personas in their own right, a pair you could trust to advance the story.

While Cooper might have occupied this age totally, she was never the typical fish not seeing the ocean because it’s ubiquitous. She had a compassion and an perceptive wisdom that you could easily miss from hearing her talk. Every character, from the dog to the horse to her mother and father to her international student's relative, was always “absolutely sweet” – unless, that is, they were “absolutely divine”. People got assaulted and worse in Cooper’s work, but that was never acceptable – it’s remarkable how tolerated it is in many more highbrow books of the time.

Class and Character

She was affluent middle-class, which for practical purposes meant that her dad had to work for a living, but she’d have defined the social classes more by their mores. The middle classes fretted about everything, all the time – what society might think, primarily – and the aristocracy didn’t care a … well “stuff”. She was risqué, at times extremely, but her dialogue was always refined.

She’d narrate her childhood in storybook prose: “Dad went to Dunkirk and Mother was terribly, terribly worried”. They were both completely gorgeous, engaged in a enduring romance, and this Cooper mirrored in her own partnership, to a publisher of historical accounts, Leo Cooper. She was twenty-four, he was twenty-seven, the marriage wasn’t smooth sailing (he was a unfaithful type), but she was always at ease giving people the secret for a happy marriage, which is creaking bed springs but (big reveal), they’re noisy with all the laughter. He didn't read her books – he picked up Prudence once, when he had a cold, and said it made him feel worse. She didn’t mind, and said it was mutual: she wouldn’t be seen dead reading military history.

Forever keep a journal – it’s very challenging, when you’re mid-twenties, to recall what age 24 felt like

Initial Novels

Prudence (1978) was the fifth volume in the Romance novels, which began with Emily in 1975. If you approached Cooper in reverse, having begun in Rutshire, the initial books, alternatively called “the novels named after posh girls” – also Imogen and Harriet – were close but no cigar, every hero feeling like a test-run for the iconic character, every main character a little bit drippy. Plus, line for line (Without exact data), there wasn't the same quantity of sex in them. They were a bit reserved on topics of propriety, women always fretting that men would think they’re promiscuous, men saying outrageous statements about why they favored virgins (in much the same way, seemingly, as a real man always wants to be the primary to open a tin of instant coffee). I don’t know if I’d recommend reading these books at a impressionable age. I believed for a while that that was what posh people really thought.

They were, however, remarkably tightly written, high-functioning romances, which is far more difficult than it appears. You experienced Harriet’s unwanted pregnancy, Bella’s pissy family-by-marriage, Emily’s Scottish isolation – Cooper could guide you from an hopeless moment to a windfall of the emotions, and you could not once, even in the beginning, put your finger on how she achieved it. Suddenly you’d be laughing at her incredibly close accounts of the sheets, the following moment you’d have watery eyes and little understanding how they arrived.

Literary Guidance

Inquired how to be a novelist, Cooper frequently advised the kind of thing that Ernest Hemingway would have said, if he could have been inclined to help out a aspiring writer: use all all of your faculties, say how things aromatic and appeared and audible and tactile and palatable – it really lifts the narrative. But likely more helpful was: “Forever keep a journal – it’s very difficult, when you’re 25, to recollect what twenty-four felt like.” That’s one of the first things you notice, in the longer, more populated books, which have seventeen main characters rather than just a single protagonist, all with extremely posh names, unless they’re Stateside, in which case they’re called a simple moniker. Even an years apart of a few years, between two siblings, between a gentleman and a woman, you can hear in the conversation.

An Author's Tale

The backstory of Riders was so perfectly characteristically Cooper it might not have been real, except it absolutely is real because a major newspaper made a public request about it at the period: she finished the whole manuscript in the early 70s, well before the Romances, took it into the West End and left it on a vehicle. Some detail has been purposely excluded of this story – what, for example, was so important in the West End that you would forget the only copy of your book on a train, which is not that unlike forgetting your baby on a transport? Surely an meeting, but what kind?

Cooper was inclined to amp up her own chaos and haplessness