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The beloved novelist Jilly Cooper, who died suddenly at the age of 88, racked up sales of 11 million books of her assorted epic books over her 50-year literary career. Adored by anyone with any sense over a particular age (45), she was introduced to a younger audience last year with the TV adaptation of Rivals.

Cooper's Fictional Universe

Cooper purists would have preferred to see the Rutshire chronicles in order: beginning with Riders, originally published in the mid-80s, in which the character Rupert Campbell-Black, cad, philanderer, horse rider, is initially presented. But that’s a side note – what was remarkable about viewing Rivals as a box set was how well Cooper’s world had remained relevant. The chronicles distilled the 80s: the power dressing and puffball skirts; the obsession with class; aristocrats disdaining the ostentatious newly wealthy, both overlooking everyone else while they quibbled about how warm their champagne was; the sexual politics, with inappropriate behavior and assault so routine they were practically personas in their own right, a double act you could trust to move the plot along.

While Cooper might have inhabited this age fully, she was never the typical fish not noticing the ocean because it’s ubiquitous. She had a empathy and an observational intelligence that you maybe wouldn’t guess from hearing her talk. Everyone, from the dog to the horse to her parents to her French exchange’s brother, was always “absolutely sweet” – unless, that is, they were “truly heavenly”. People got groped and further in Cooper’s work, but that was never condoned – it’s astonishing how OK it is in many supposedly sophisticated books of the era.

Social Strata and Personality

She was well-to-do, which for real-world terms meant that her father had to work for a living, but she’d have described the strata more by their values. The middle classes fretted about everything, all the time – what society might think, primarily – and the elite didn’t bother with “nonsense”. She was spicy, at times incredibly so, but her dialogue was never coarse.

She’d narrate her childhood in fairytale terms: “Dad went to Dunkirk and Mom was deeply concerned”. They were both utterly beautiful, involved in a enduring romance, and this Cooper emulated in her own marriage, to a businessman of war books, Leo Cooper. She was twenty-four, he was in his late twenties, the union wasn’t without hiccups (he was a unfaithful type), but she was consistently confident giving people the secret for a happy marriage, which is squeaky bed but (big reveal), they’re creaking with all the laughter. He didn't read her books – he tried Prudence once, when he had a cold, and said it made him feel unwell. She took no offense, and said it was returned: she wouldn’t be seen dead reading military history.

Constantly keep a journal – it’s very difficult, when you’re twenty-five, to recall what being 24 felt like

Early Works

Prudence (the late 70s) was the fifth book in the Romance novels, which began with Emily in the mid-70s. If you approached Cooper backwards, having started in her later universe, the initial books, alternatively called “the novels named after affluent ladies” – also Bella and Harriet – were almost there, every protagonist feeling like a test-run for the iconic character, every female lead a little bit insipid. Plus, chapter for chapter (Without exact data), there wasn't the same quantity of sex in them. They were a bit uptight on topics of propriety, women always being anxious that men would think they’re promiscuous, men saying ridiculous comments about why they liked virgins (comparably, ostensibly, as a real man always wants to be the first to unseal a jar of coffee). I don’t know if I’d recommend reading these novels at a impressionable age. I thought for a while that that’s what the upper class actually believed.

They were, however, incredibly precisely constructed, high-functioning romances, which is considerably tougher than it sounds. You experienced Harriet’s unwanted pregnancy, Bella’s pissy in-laws, Emily’s loneliness in Scotland – Cooper could guide you from an hopeless moment to a windfall of the emotions, and you could not once, even in the beginning, identify how she did it. Suddenly you’d be smiling at her incredibly close accounts of the bed linen, the next you’d have tears in your eyes and no idea how they arrived.

Authorial Advice

Questioned how to be a novelist, Cooper frequently advised the type of guidance that the famous author would have said, if he could have been bothered to assist a aspiring writer: employ all five of your faculties, say how things aromatic and seemed and audible and felt and tasted – it significantly enhances the narrative. But likely more helpful 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 notice, in the more extensive, densely peopled books, which have seventeen main characters rather than just one lead, all with very upper-class names, unless they’re Stateside, in which case they’re called a simple moniker. Even an age difference of several years, between two sisters, between a man and a female, you can hear 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 ran an appeal about it at the period: she completed the whole manuscript in the early 70s, well before the early novels, brought it into the city center and forgot it on a bus. Some context has been purposely excluded of this story – what, for instance, was so crucial in the West End that you would abandon the unique draft of your novel on a bus, which is not that far from leaving your infant on a transport? Certainly an assignation, but what sort?

Cooper was prone to embellish her own messiness and ineptitude