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The beloved novelist Jilly Cooper, who left us unexpectedly at the age of 88, sold 11m books of her various sweeping books over her 50-year literary career. Cherished by all discerning readers over a particular age (45), she was presented to a younger audience last year with the streaming series adaptation of Rivals.

The Rutshire Chronicles

Cooper purists would have preferred to see the Rutshire chronicles in sequence: beginning with Riders, initially released in 1985, in which the character Rupert Campbell-Black, scoundrel, heartbreaker, horse rider, is first introduced. But that’s a side note – what was striking about viewing Rivals as a complete series was how effectively Cooper’s world had stood the test of time. The chronicles captured the 1980s: the power dressing and voluminous skirts; the preoccupation with social class; aristocrats sneering at the flashy new money, both ignoring everyone else while they quibbled about how lukewarm their champagne was; the intimate power struggles, with unwanted advances and abuse so everyday they were virtually figures in their own right, a duo you could trust to advance the story.

While Cooper might have lived in this period totally, she was never the proverbial fish not perceiving the ocean because it’s everywhere. She had a humanity and an observational intelligence that you could easily miss from hearing her talk. All her creations, from the dog to the horse to her mother and father to her international student's relative, was always “utterly charming” – unless, that is, they were “completely exquisite”. People got groped and further in Cooper’s work, but that was never OK – it’s surprising how acceptable it is in many far more literary books of the era.

Class and Character

She was upper-middle-class, which for practical purposes meant that her father had to work for a living, but she’d have described the strata more by their values. The bourgeoisie fretted about everything, all the time – what others might think, mostly – and the elite didn’t give a … well “stuff”. She was risqué, at times extremely, but her prose was never coarse.

She’d describe her family life in fairytale terms: “Daddy went to battle and Mummy was deeply concerned”. They were both absolutely stunning, participating in a eternal partnership, and this Cooper replicated in her own union, to a publisher of military histories, Leo Cooper. She was 24, he was in his late twenties, the marriage wasn’t perfect (he was a philanderer), but she was never less than confident giving people the secret for a successful union, which is noisy mattress but (key insight), they’re creaking with all the joy. He avoided reading her books – he read Prudence once, when he had influenza, and said it made him feel unwell. She didn’t mind, and said it was mutual: she wouldn’t be caught reading battle accounts.

Always keep a journal – it’s very difficult, when you’re twenty-five, to remember what twenty-four felt like

Initial Novels

Prudence (the late 70s) was the fifth installment in the Romance series, which began with Emily in the mid-70s. If you discovered Cooper in reverse, having commenced in the main series, the early novels, alternatively called “the books named after affluent ladies” – also Bella and Harriet – were almost there, every protagonist feeling like a test-run for Rupert, every heroine a little bit drippy. Plus, chapter for chapter (Without exact data), there was less sex in them. They were a bit conservative on matters of modesty, women always being anxious that men would think they’re loose, men saying ridiculous comments about why they favored virgins (similarly, ostensibly, as a genuine guy always wants to be the initial to break a container of Nescafé). I don’t know if I’d advise reading these books at a impressionable age. I thought for a while that that is what posh people genuinely felt.

They were, however, remarkably well-crafted, high-functioning romances, which is considerably tougher than it appears. You lived Harriet’s unwanted pregnancy, Bella’s pissy in-laws, Emily’s Scottish isolation – Cooper could guide you from an hopeless moment to a lottery win of the heart, and you could not once, even in the early days, put your finger on how she did it. Suddenly you’d be chuckling at her incredibly close descriptions of the bed linen, the subsequently you’d have tears in your eyes and no idea how they got there.

Literary Guidance

Questioned how to be a author, Cooper would often state the sort of advice that Ernest Hemingway would have said, if he could have been bothered to assist a aspiring writer: employ all five of your senses, say how things aromatic and seemed and heard and touched and palatable – it really lifts the prose. But probably more useful was: “Always keep a diary – it’s very hard, when you’re 25, to recall what age 24 felt like.” That’s one of the primary realizations you detect, in the longer, more populated books, which have 17 heroines rather than just one lead, all with very upper-class names, unless they’re American, in which case they’re called a common name. Even an generational gap of four years, between two siblings, between a gentleman and a lady, you can perceive in the conversation.

The Lost Manuscript

The backstory of Riders was so perfectly Jilly Cooper it couldn't possibly have been accurate, except it definitely is real because a major newspaper made a public request about it at the time: she wrote the whole manuscript in 1970, well before the first books, brought it into the West End and left it on a public transport. Some detail has been purposely excluded of this story – what, for example, was so crucial in the city that you would leave the only copy of your book on a train, which is not that different from abandoning your infant on a railway? Undoubtedly an rendezvous, but what sort?

Cooper was wont to exaggerate her own disorder and haplessness