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Jilly Cooper, who left us unexpectedly at the 88 years of age, racked up sales of eleven million volumes of her various epic books over her half-century career in writing. Beloved by all discerning readers over a certain age (mid-forties), she was presented to a new generation last year with the Disney+ adaptation of Rivals.

The Rutshire Chronicles

Longtime readers would have liked to view the Rutshire chronicles in sequence: starting with Riders, first published in 1985, in which Rupert Campbell-Black, cad, philanderer, horse rider, is debuts. But that’s a side note – what was notable about seeing Rivals as a box set was how brilliantly Cooper’s universe had aged. The chronicles captured the 1980s: the shoulder pads and voluminous skirts; the obsession with class; nobility sneering at the Technicolored nouveau riche, both ignoring everyone else while they quibbled about how warm their champagne was; the intimate power struggles, with inappropriate behavior and misconduct so everyday they were practically characters in their own right, a pair you could trust to move the plot along.

While Cooper might have lived in this age totally, she was never the typical fish not perceiving the ocean because it’s everywhere. She had a compassion and an keen insight that you might not expect from listening to her speak. Everyone, from the pet 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 assaulted and more in Cooper’s work, but that was never condoned – it’s surprising how OK it is in many supposedly sophisticated books of the time.

Background and Behavior

She was affluent middle-class, which for real-world terms meant that her father had to work for a living, but she’d have characterized the classes more by their mores. The bourgeoisie fretted about every little detail, all the time – what others might think, mainly – and the upper classes didn’t care a … well “such things”. She was raunchy, at times incredibly so, but her language was never vulgar.

She’d narrate her family life in storybook prose: “Daddy went to Dunkirk and Mom was deeply concerned”. They were both completely gorgeous, participating in a enduring romance, and this Cooper mirrored in her own marriage, to a businessman of war books, Leo Cooper. She was 24, he was 27, the marriage wasn’t perfect (he was a philanderer), but she was always comfortable giving people the recipe for a successful union, which is noisy mattress but (crucial point), they’re squeaking with all the mirth. He didn't read her books – he picked up Prudence once, when he had influenza, and said it made him feel worse. She didn’t mind, and said it was returned: she wouldn’t be spotted reading battle accounts.

Forever keep a diary – it’s very challenging, when you’re 25, to recall what age 24 felt like

Initial Novels

Prudence (1978) was the fifth installment in the Romance novels, which commenced with Emily in 1975. If you came to Cooper backwards, having commenced in her later universe, the Romances, AKA “the novels named after upper-class women” – also Octavia and Harriet – were near misses, every protagonist feeling like a prototype for the iconic character, every main character a little bit drippy. Plus, line for line (I can't verify statistically), there wasn’t as much sex in them. They were a bit conservative on issues of propriety, women always fretting that men would think they’re immoral, men saying ridiculous comments about why they favored virgins (comparably, apparently, as a real man always wants to be the initial to unseal a tin of instant coffee). I don’t know if I’d recommend reading these stories at a impressionable age. I assumed for a while that that’s what affluent individuals genuinely felt.

They were, however, remarkably well-crafted, effective romances, which is considerably tougher than it seems. You experienced Harriet’s unplanned pregnancy, Bella’s difficult family-by-marriage, Emily’s loneliness in Scotland – Cooper could take you from an hopeless moment to a jackpot of the emotions, and you could never, even in the beginning, put your finger on how she achieved it. One minute you’d be smiling at her highly specific depictions of the sheets, the next you’d have watery eyes and no idea how they got there.

Writing Wisdom

Inquired how to be a writer, Cooper frequently advised the type of guidance that Ernest Hemingway would have said, if he could have been bothered to assist a beginner: use all all of your senses, say how things smelled and appeared and heard and tactile and tasted – it really lifts the narrative. But likely more helpful was: “Constantly keep a notebook – it’s very difficult, when you’re 25, to recall what twenty-four felt like.” That’s one of the first things you detect, in the more extensive, more populated books, which have numerous female leads rather than just one lead, all with extremely posh names, unless they’re American, in which case they’re called Helen. Even an years apart of several years, between two sisters, between a gentleman and a lady, you can detect in the conversation.

A Literary Mystery

The backstory of Riders was so exactly Jilly Cooper it can’t possibly have been real, except it certainly was true because a London paper ran an appeal about it at the time: she finished the complete book in the early 70s, prior to the early novels, brought it into the downtown and misplaced it on a bus. Some detail has been deliberately left out of this tale – what, for instance, was so significant in the West End that you would forget the unique draft of your book on a bus, which is not that unlike forgetting your child on a train? Certainly an assignation, but what kind?

Cooper was prone to embellish her own chaos and clumsiness