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The celebrated author Jilly Cooper, who died suddenly at the 88 years of age, sold 11 million copies of her various epic books over her half-century literary career. Cherished by all discerning readers over a specific age (mid-forties), she was presented to a modern audience last year with the TV adaptation of Rivals.

The Beloved Series

Cooper purists would have liked to see the Rutshire chronicles in sequence: commencing with Riders, originally published in 1985, in which the character Rupert Campbell-Black, cad, philanderer, horse rider, is debuts. But that’s a sidebar – what was notable about seeing Rivals as a box set was how effectively Cooper’s world had remained relevant. The chronicles encapsulated the eighties: the broad shoulders and voluminous skirts; the fixation on status; nobility sneering at the Technicolored nouveau riche, both dismissing everyone else while they quibbled about how warm their champagne was; the sexual politics, with harassment and abuse so commonplace they were virtually figures in their own right, a double act you could rely on to advance the story.

While Cooper might have inhabited this age totally, she was never the typical fish not noticing the ocean because it’s all around. She had a empathy and an observational intelligence that you could easily miss from her public persona. Everyone, from the dog to the horse to her parents to her foreign exchange sibling, was always “utterly charming” – unless, that is, they were “absolutely divine”. People got assaulted and more in Cooper’s work, but that was never acceptable – it’s astonishing how OK it is in many supposedly sophisticated books of the period.

Class and Character

She was affluent middle-class, which for real-world terms meant that her dad had to work for a living, but she’d have described the strata more by their customs. The bourgeoisie worried about everything, all the time – what other people might think, primarily – and the elite didn’t give a … well “stuff”. She was risqué, at times very much, but her language was always refined.

She’d narrate her family life in storybook prose: “Father went to battle and Mummy was terribly, terribly worried”. They were both utterly beautiful, engaged in a enduring romance, and this Cooper emulated in her own marriage, to a publisher of historical accounts, Leo Cooper. She was 24, he was 27, the marriage wasn’t without hiccups (he was a bit of a shagger), but she was always comfortable giving people the formula for a blissful partnership, which is noisy mattress but (key insight), they’re creaking with all the laughter. He avoided reading her books – he picked up Prudence once, when he had a cold, and said it made him feel unwell. She wasn't bothered, and said it was mutual: she wouldn’t be seen dead reading war chronicles.

Constantly keep a journal – it’s very challenging, when you’re mid-twenties, to remember what age 24 felt like

Initial Novels

Prudence (1978) was the fifth installment in the Romance novels, which started with Emily in the mid-70s. If you came to Cooper in reverse, having begun in the main series, the early novels, alternatively called “those ones named after posh girls” – also Bella and Harriet – were almost there, every protagonist feeling like a test-run for Rupert, every female lead a little bit drippy. Plus, page for page (I haven’t actually run the numbers), there wasn't the same quantity of sex in them. They were a bit uptight on matters of decorum, women always worrying 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 primary to break a jar of Nescafé). I don’t know if I’d suggest reading these books at a impressionable age. I thought for a while that that is what the upper class genuinely felt.

They were, however, extremely well-crafted, high-functioning romances, which is far more difficult than it appears. You experienced Harriet’s unwanted pregnancy, Bella’s pissy relatives, Emily’s loneliness in Scotland – Cooper could guide you from an desperate moment to a lottery win of the heart, and you could not ever, even in the early days, pinpoint how she did it. One minute you’d be smiling at her meticulously detailed accounts of the bedding, the subsequently you’d have emotional response and no idea how they arrived.

Writing Wisdom

Asked how to be a writer, Cooper used to say the kind of thing that Ernest Hemingway would have said, if he could have been bothered to assist a novice: use all five of your senses, say how things scented and looked and audible and felt and tasted – it greatly improves the writing. But probably more useful was: “Forever keep a diary – it’s very challenging, when you’re twenty-five, to remember what twenty-four felt like.” That’s one of the initial observations you detect, in the more extensive, densely peopled books, which have seventeen main characters rather than just a single protagonist, all with very upper-class names, unless they’re Stateside, in which case they’re called Helen. Even an generational gap of several years, between two sisters, between a male and a lady, you can perceive in the speech.

A Literary Mystery

The backstory of Riders was so pitch-perfectly characteristically Cooper it couldn't possibly have been true, except it absolutely is true because London’s Evening Standard ran an appeal about it at the time: she completed the entire draft in 1970, prior to the early novels, took it into the city center and forgot it on a public transport. Some detail has been deliberately left out of this tale – what, for case, was so significant in the urban area that you would abandon the unique draft of your book on a bus, which is not that far from forgetting your child on a train? Certainly an meeting, but what sort?

Cooper was wont to exaggerate her own disorder and clumsiness