🔗 Share this article

The beloved novelist Jilly Cooper, who died suddenly at the 88 years old, racked up sales of 11m volumes of her various grand books over her five-decade writing career. Beloved by every sensible person over a particular age (forty-five), she was presented to a new generation last year with the TV adaptation of Rivals.

Cooper's Fictional Universe

Devoted fans would have wanted to view the Rutshire chronicles in sequence: beginning with Riders, initially released in 1985, in which Rupert Campbell-Black, rogue, heartbreaker, horse rider, is debuts. But that’s a minor point – what was striking about viewing Rivals as a complete series was how brilliantly Cooper’s world had stood the test of time. The chronicles encapsulated the eighties: the power dressing and bubble skirts; the fixation on status; the upper class sneering at the ostentatious newly wealthy, both ignoring everyone else while they snipped about how room-temperature their champagne was; the gender dynamics, with inappropriate behavior and assault so everyday they were practically personas in their own right, a pair you could rely on to drive the narrative forward.

While Cooper might have occupied this era completely, she was never the classic fish not seeing the ocean because it’s all around. She had a compassion and an perceptive wisdom that you could easily miss from her public persona. All her creations, from the canine to the pony to her family to her international student's relative, was always “utterly charming” – unless, that is, they were “absolutely divine”. People got harassed and worse in Cooper’s work, but that was never condoned – it’s astonishing how tolerated it is in many far more literary books of the era.

Background and Behavior

She was upper-middle-class, which for all intents and purposes meant that her parent had to earn an income, but she’d have described the classes more by their customs. The middle-class people fretted about every little detail, all the time – what society might think, mainly – and the upper classes didn’t bother with “stuff”. She was risqué, at times very much, but her language was never vulgar.

She’d narrate her upbringing in storybook prose: “Daddy went to Dunkirk and Mom was terribly, terribly worried”. They were both utterly beautiful, participating in a lifelong love match, and this Cooper emulated in her own partnership, to a editor of historical accounts, Leo Cooper. She was twenty-four, he was in his late twenties, the marriage wasn’t smooth sailing (he was a unfaithful type), but she was consistently at ease giving people the secret for a blissful partnership, which is squeaky bed but (big reveal), they’re creaking with all the joy. He avoided reading her books – he tried Prudence once, when he had a cold, and said it made him feel worse. She didn’t mind, and said it was returned: she wouldn’t be caught reading battle accounts.

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

Early Works

Prudence (the late 70s) was the fifth book in the Romance collection, which started with Emily in 1975. If you discovered Cooper backwards, having started in the main series, 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 prototype for the iconic character, every heroine a little bit insipid. Plus, line for line (I can't verify statistically), there wasn’t as much sex in them. They were a bit reserved on issues of modesty, women always worrying that men would think they’re immoral, men saying ridiculous comments about why they liked virgins (comparably, seemingly, as a genuine guy always wants to be the primary to open a container of coffee). I don’t know if I’d recommend reading these books at a formative age. I believed for a while that that was what affluent individuals really thought.

They were, however, incredibly well-crafted, effective romances, which is much harder than it appears. You felt Harriet’s surprise baby, Bella’s difficult in-laws, Emily’s remote Scottish life – Cooper could transport you from an hopeless moment to a lottery win of the emotions, and you could not ever, even in the initial stages, pinpoint how she achieved it. One minute you’d be smiling at her incredibly close depictions of the sheets, the following moment you’d have emotional response and little understanding how they got there.

Writing Wisdom

Questioned how to be a author, Cooper would often state the sort of advice that the famous author would have said, if he could have been arsed to help out a novice: employ all all of your faculties, say how things scented and appeared and heard and touched and tasted – it greatly improves the prose. But perhaps more practical was: “Forever keep a notebook – it’s very hard, when you’re twenty-five, to recall what being 24 felt like.” That’s one of the first things you detect, in the longer, character-rich books, which have seventeen main characters rather than just one, all with decidedly aristocratic names, unless they’re American, in which case they’re called Helen. Even an generational gap of four years, between two relatives, between a man and a lady, you can hear in the dialogue.

A Literary Mystery

The historical account of Riders was so pitch-perfectly typical of the author it might not have been real, except it definitely is factual because London’s Evening Standard made a public request about it at the era: she completed the whole manuscript in the early 70s, well before the early novels, brought it into the downtown and misplaced it on a bus. Some texture has been intentionally omitted of this story – what, for example, was so significant in the West End that you would leave the only copy of your manuscript on a bus, which is not that different from forgetting your child on a railway? Certainly an rendezvous, but what kind?

Cooper was prone to exaggerate her own messiness and ineptitude