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The celebrated author Jilly Cooper, who passed away unexpectedly at the 88 years of age, achieved sales of 11m volumes of her many grand books over her half-century writing career. Cherished by anyone with any sense over a specific age (45), she was presented to a new generation last year with the Disney+ adaptation of Rivals.

The Beloved Series

Cooper purists would have liked to view the Rutshire chronicles in order: commencing with Riders, first published in the mid-80s, in which the character Rupert Campbell-Black, rogue, heartbreaker, horse rider, is debuts. But that’s a sidebar – what was notable about seeing Rivals as a box set was how brilliantly Cooper’s world had aged. The chronicles captured the eighties: the power dressing and puffball skirts; the obsession with class; the upper class looking down on the flashy new money, both overlooking everyone else while they quibbled about how lukewarm their bubbly was; the sexual politics, with harassment and abuse so everyday they were almost figures in their own right, a duo you could rely on to drive the narrative forward.

While Cooper might have lived in this period completely, she was never the proverbial fish not seeing the ocean because it’s everywhere. She had a compassion and an observational intelligence that you might not expect from listening to her speak. Everyone, from the canine to the horse to her parents to her international student's relative, was always “utterly charming” – unless, that is, they were “absolutely divine”. People got assaulted and worse in Cooper’s work, but that was never acceptable – it’s astonishing how tolerated it is in many more highbrow books of the time.

Class and Character

She was affluent middle-class, which for real-world terms meant that her parent had to work for a living, but she’d have defined the classes more by their mores. The middle-class people worried about all things, all the time – what other people might think, mostly – and the upper classes didn’t give a … well “such things”. She was risqué, at times very much, but her dialogue was always refined.

She’d narrate her upbringing in fairytale terms: “Father went to the war and Mom was extremely anxious”. They were both utterly beautiful, participating in a lifelong love match, and this Cooper emulated in her own union, to a publisher of historical accounts, Leo Cooper. She was 24, he was in his late twenties, the relationship wasn’t without hiccups (he was a unfaithful type), but she was always comfortable giving people the recipe for a blissful partnership, which is creaking bed springs but (crucial point), they’re noisy with all the joy. He avoided reading her books – he read Prudence once, when he had a cold, and said it made him feel more ill. She didn’t mind, and said it was returned: she wouldn’t be spotted reading battle accounts.

Forever keep a notebook – it’s very challenging, when you’re twenty-five, to remember what twenty-four felt like

The Romance Series

Prudence (the late 70s) was the fifth volume in the Romance series, which started with Emily in the mid-70s. If you came to Cooper from the later works, having started in the main series, the initial books, also known as “the novels named after upper-class women” – also Bella and Harriet – were near misses, every male lead feeling like a trial version for Campbell-Black, every main character a little bit weak. Plus, page for page (Without exact data), there wasn't the same quantity of sex in them. They were a bit uptight on topics of decorum, women always fretting that men would think they’re promiscuous, men saying ridiculous comments about why they preferred virgins (similarly, seemingly, as a true gentleman always wants to be the first to break a jar of Nescafé). I don’t know if I’d advise reading these novels at a young age. I believed for a while that that was what posh people genuinely felt.

They were, however, extremely precisely constructed, successful romances, which is considerably tougher than it seems. You experienced Harriet’s unwanted pregnancy, Bella’s difficult in-laws, Emily’s loneliness in Scotland – Cooper could take you from an desperate moment to a jackpot of the emotions, and you could not once, even in the initial stages, put your finger on how she managed it. At one moment you’d be smiling at her highly specific descriptions of the bed linen, the next you’d have emotional response and no idea how they appeared.

Literary Guidance

Questioned how to be a writer, Cooper would often state the sort of advice that the literary giant would have said, if he could have been inclined to guide a aspiring writer: utilize all five of your senses, say how things smelled and seemed and heard and touched and tasted – it really lifts the narrative. But perhaps more practical was: “Constantly keep a notebook – it’s very difficult, when you’re 25, to recall what age 24 felt like.” That’s one of the first things you detect, in the longer, character-rich books, which have numerous female leads rather than just one lead, all with extremely posh names, unless they’re Stateside, in which case they’re called Helen. Even an generational gap of a few years, between two sisters, between a male and a lady, you can detect in the dialogue.

The Lost Manuscript

The historical account of Riders was so pitch-perfectly Jilly Cooper it can’t possibly have been real, except it definitely is factual because London’s Evening Standard made a public request about it at the time: she finished the whole manuscript in 1970, well before the early novels, brought it into the West End and forgot it on a public transport. Some texture has been intentionally omitted of this story – what, for example, was so important in the West End that you would abandon the sole version of your book on a bus, which is not that far from forgetting your baby on a transport? Surely an rendezvous, but what sort?

Cooper was inclined to exaggerate her own chaos and ineptitude