🔗 Share this article

Jilly Cooper, who died suddenly at the 88 years of age, achieved sales of 11 million copies of her many grand books over her 50-year literary career. Cherished by every sensible person over a specific age (forty-five), she was introduced to a modern audience last year with the TV adaptation of Rivals.

Cooper's Fictional Universe

Longtime readers would have liked to watch the Rutshire chronicles in sequence: commencing with Riders, originally published in 1985, in which the infamous Rupert Campbell-Black, rogue, philanderer, horse rider, is first introduced. But that’s a minor point – what was notable about viewing Rivals as a binge-watch was how well Cooper’s world had remained relevant. The chronicles captured the 80s: the broad shoulders and voluminous skirts; the preoccupation with social class; nobility looking down on the ostentatious newly wealthy, both overlooking everyone else while they complained about how room-temperature their sparkling wine was; the gender dynamics, with harassment and misconduct so routine they were practically figures in their own right, a pair you could count on to move the plot along.

While Cooper might have lived in this era totally, she was never the classic fish not seeing the ocean because it’s ubiquitous. She had a compassion and an perceptive wisdom that you might not expect from listening to her speak. All her creations, from the pet to the equine to her family to her foreign exchange sibling, was always “utterly charming” – unless, that is, they were “completely exquisite”. People got assaulted and further in Cooper’s work, but that was never OK – it’s surprising how OK it is in many far more literary books of the time.

Background and Behavior

She was upper-middle-class, which for all intents and purposes meant that her dad had to earn an income, but she’d have characterized the social classes more by their customs. The middle classes anxiously contemplated about all things, all the time – what others might think, primarily – and the elite didn’t bother with “nonsense”. She was risqué, at times incredibly so, but her prose was always refined.

She’d recount her childhood in storybook prose: “Dad went to Dunkirk and Mom was terribly, terribly worried”. They were both completely gorgeous, involved in a eternal partnership, and this Cooper emulated in her own union, to a businessman of military histories, Leo Cooper. She was twenty-four, he was 27, the relationship wasn’t without hiccups (he was a bit of a shagger), but she was never less than at ease giving people the formula for a happy marriage, which is creaking bed springs but (key insight), they’re creaking with all the laughter. He didn't read her books – he read Prudence once, when he had a cold, and said it made him feel unwell. She wasn't bothered, and said it was mutual: she wouldn’t be caught reading battle accounts.

Always keep a notebook – it’s very hard, when you’re twenty-five, to recollect what age 24 felt like

Early Works

Prudence (the late 70s) was the fifth installment in the Romance series, which started with Emily in the mid-70s. If you came to Cooper backwards, having commenced in her later universe, the initial books, alternatively called “those ones named after affluent ladies” – also Imogen and Harriet – were near misses, every protagonist feeling like a trial version for the iconic character, every heroine a little bit weak. Plus, page for page (I can't verify statistically), there was less sex in them. They were a bit reserved on matters of decorum, women always being anxious that men would think they’re immoral, men saying batshit things about why they liked virgins (similarly, seemingly, as a genuine guy always wants to be the initial to break a container of Nescafé). I don’t know if I’d recommend reading these books at a impressionable age. I thought for a while that that was what affluent individuals actually believed.

They were, however, remarkably precisely constructed, high-functioning romances, which is far more difficult than it appears. You experienced Harriet’s surprise baby, Bella’s annoying family-by-marriage, Emily’s loneliness in Scotland – Cooper could take you from an desperate moment to a lottery win of the soul, and you could never, even in the early days, identify how she achieved it. One minute you’d be laughing at her incredibly close depictions of the bedding, the following moment you’d have watery eyes and uncertainty how they appeared.

Literary Guidance

Inquired how to be a writer, Cooper used to say the kind of thing that the literary giant would have said, if he could have been arsed to help out a aspiring writer: employ all all of your perceptions, say how things scented and appeared and heard and touched and palatable – it greatly improves the narrative. But likely more helpful was: “Always keep a notebook – it’s very challenging, when you’re twenty-five, to recollect what age 24 felt like.” That’s one of the primary realizations you observe, in the longer, character-rich books, which have seventeen main characters rather than just one, all with extremely posh names, unless they’re Stateside, in which case they’re called a simple moniker. Even an age difference of a few years, between two sisters, between a man and a woman, you can detect in the speech.

An Author's Tale

The historical account of Riders was so pitch-perfectly typical of the author it might not have been accurate, except it definitely is true because a London paper ran an appeal about it at the period: she wrote the entire draft in 1970, prior to the Romances, took it into the city center and misplaced it on a bus. Some texture has been deliberately left out of this anecdote – what, for case, was so crucial in the city that you would forget the only copy of your book on a public transport, which is not that far from abandoning your child on a railway? Certainly an rendezvous, but what sort?

Cooper was prone to embellish her own disorder and haplessness