🔗 Share this article

The beloved novelist Jilly Cooper, who died suddenly at the 88 years old, achieved sales of 11m copies of her various sweeping books over her 50-year literary career. Cherished by all discerning readers over a particular age (forty-five), she was introduced to a modern audience last year with the TV adaptation of Rivals.

The Beloved Series

Cooper purists would have liked to see the Rutshire chronicles in order: commencing with Riders, originally published in the mid-80s, in which the character Rupert Campbell-Black, cad, heartbreaker, equestrian, is first introduced. But that’s a side note – what was remarkable about viewing Rivals as a box set was how effectively Cooper’s fictional realm had stood the test of time. The chronicles encapsulated the 1980s: the broad shoulders and voluminous skirts; the preoccupation with social class; the upper class looking down on the flashy new money, both dismissing everyone else while they complained about how lukewarm their sparkling wine was; the intimate power struggles, with harassment and abuse so everyday they were virtually personas in their own right, a duo you could trust to move the plot along.

While Cooper might have lived in this period completely, she was never the proverbial fish not perceiving the ocean because it’s all around. She had a compassion and an perceptive wisdom that you could easily miss from listening to her speak. Everyone, from the canine to the pony to her family to her foreign exchange sibling, was always “completely delightful” – unless, that is, they were “completely exquisite”. People got assaulted and more in Cooper’s work, but that was never condoned – it’s astonishing how OK it is in many supposedly sophisticated books of the time.

Social Strata and Personality

She was upper-middle-class, which for practical purposes meant that her parent had to hold down a job, but she’d have defined the strata more by their mores. The middle classes worried about all things, all the time – what other people might think, mostly – and the upper classes didn’t care a … well “nonsense”. She was risqué, at times very much, but her language was never coarse.

She’d narrate her family life in storybook prose: “Dad went to battle and Mom was extremely anxious”. They were both utterly beautiful, engaged in a eternal partnership, and this Cooper replicated in her own partnership, to a editor of war books, Leo Cooper. She was twenty-four, he was in his late twenties, the union wasn’t perfect (he was a philanderer), but she was never less than at ease giving people the formula for a blissful partnership, which is noisy mattress but (crucial point), they’re creaking with all the mirth. He avoided reading her books – he read Prudence once, when he had flu, and said it made him feel more ill. She didn’t mind, and said it was reciprocated: she wouldn’t be caught reading war chronicles.

Always keep a journal – it’s very challenging, when you’re twenty-five, to recollect what being 24 felt like

Early Works

Prudence (the late 70s) was the fifth volume in the Romance novels, which began with Emily in the mid-70s. If you approached Cooper in reverse, having started in the main series, the initial books, alternatively called “those ones named after affluent ladies” – also Octavia and Harriet – were close but no cigar, every male lead feeling like a trial version for Campbell-Black, every female lead a little bit insipid. Plus, page for page (I haven’t actually run the numbers), there wasn’t as much sex in them. They were a bit uptight on topics of propriety, women always being anxious that men would think they’re immoral, men saying batshit things about why they preferred virgins (comparably, apparently, as a true gentleman always wants to be the primary to break a tin of coffee). I don’t know if I’d recommend reading these novels at a young age. I believed for a while that that was what the upper class really thought.

They were, however, remarkably well-crafted, effective romances, which is far more difficult than it seems. You lived Harriet’s surprise baby, Bella’s difficult in-laws, Emily’s remote Scottish life – Cooper could take you from an desperate moment to a jackpot of the heart, and you could not ever, even in the initial stages, identify how she achieved it. Suddenly you’d be laughing at her highly specific depictions of the bed linen, the following moment you’d have tears in your eyes and little understanding how they appeared.

Literary Guidance

Asked how to be a author, Cooper would often state the type of guidance that Ernest Hemingway would have said, if he could have been inclined to help out a novice: use all all of your senses, say how things aromatic and looked and heard and felt and palatable – it significantly enhances the writing. But perhaps more practical was: “Always keep a notebook – it’s very difficult, when you’re mid-twenties, to recollect what twenty-four felt like.” That’s one of the initial observations you detect, in the more extensive, character-rich books, which have 17 heroines rather than just one lead, all with decidedly aristocratic names, unless they’re American, in which case they’re called a simple moniker. Even an generational gap of several years, between two siblings, between a man and a lady, you can detect in the speech.

A Literary Mystery

The origin story of Riders was so exactly Jilly Cooper it can’t possibly have been accurate, except it absolutely is factual because a London paper made a public request about it at the era: she finished the complete book in the early 70s, prior to the Romances, carried it into the city center and misplaced it on a public transport. Some context has been purposely excluded of this anecdote – what, for case, was so significant in the urban area that you would forget the sole version of your novel on a train, which is not that different from forgetting your baby on a train? Surely an meeting, but which type?

Cooper was prone to exaggerate her own disorder and ineptitude