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Jilly Cooper, who died suddenly at the age of 88, achieved sales of 11m volumes of her many grand books over her half-century literary career. Beloved by every sensible person over a specific age (mid-forties), she was introduced to a modern audience last year with the TV adaptation of Rivals.

The Rutshire Chronicles

Cooper purists would have wanted to see the Rutshire chronicles in order: commencing with Riders, originally published in the mid-80s, in which the infamous Rupert Campbell-Black, rogue, charmer, equestrian, is first introduced. But that’s a minor point – what was notable about seeing Rivals as a complete series was how effectively Cooper’s fictional realm had remained relevant. The chronicles distilled the eighties: the power dressing and puffball skirts; the fixation on status; the upper class looking down on the Technicolored nouveau riche, both overlooking everyone else while they snipped about how lukewarm their champagne was; the gender dynamics, with harassment and assault so commonplace they were practically personas in their own right, a double act you could count on to advance the story.

While Cooper might have occupied this era fully, 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. All her creations, from the canine to the equine to her mother and father to her French exchange’s brother, was always “utterly charming” – unless, that is, they were “truly heavenly”. People got harassed and worse in Cooper’s work, but that was never acceptable – it’s astonishing how acceptable it is in many supposedly sophisticated books of the era.

Social Strata and Personality

She was upper-middle-class, which for all intents and purposes meant that her father had to work for a living, but she’d have characterized the social classes more by their customs. The middle-class people fretted about every little detail, all the time – what other people might think, primarily – and the upper classes didn’t care a … well “nonsense”. She was risqué, at times extremely, but her dialogue was always refined.

She’d narrate her upbringing in fairytale terms: “Daddy went to battle and Mummy was deeply concerned”. They were both utterly beautiful, involved in a lifelong love match, and this Cooper emulated in her own partnership, to a editor of war books, Leo Cooper. She was 24, he was 27, the marriage wasn’t without hiccups (he was a philanderer), but she was always comfortable giving people the secret for a blissful partnership, which is noisy mattress but (big reveal), they’re squeaking with all the laughter. 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 reciprocated: she wouldn’t be caught reading war chronicles.

Always keep a journal – it’s very challenging, when you’re 25, to recollect what being 24 felt like

Initial Novels

Prudence (1978) was the fifth volume in the Romance series, which started with Emily in 1975. If you came to Cooper in reverse, having commenced in Rutshire, the Romances, also known as “the novels named after posh girls” – also Bella and Harriet – were near misses, every protagonist feeling like a trial version for the iconic character, every heroine a little bit weak. Plus, line for line (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 fretting that men would think they’re promiscuous, men saying batshit things about why they favored virgins (similarly, apparently, as a true gentleman always wants to be the primary to open a container of instant coffee). I don’t know if I’d suggest reading these novels at a young age. I thought for a while that that’s what posh people actually believed.

They were, however, remarkably tightly written, effective romances, which is far more difficult than it seems. You felt Harriet’s unwanted pregnancy, Bella’s annoying relatives, Emily’s remote Scottish life – Cooper could take you from an hopeless moment to a windfall of the emotions, and you could not once, even in the initial stages, put your finger on how she did it. At one moment you’d be laughing at her highly specific depictions of the sheets, the next you’d have watery eyes and little understanding how they appeared.

Authorial Advice

Asked how to be a author, Cooper frequently advised the kind of thing that Ernest Hemingway would have said, if he could have been bothered to help out a beginner: employ all five of your perceptions, say how things aromatic and appeared and sounded and felt and palatable – it greatly improves the prose. But likely more helpful was: “Constantly keep a diary – it’s very difficult, when you’re 25, to remember what twenty-four felt like.” That’s one of the initial observations you detect, in the more detailed, densely peopled books, which have numerous female leads rather than just one lead, all with decidedly aristocratic names, unless they’re Stateside, in which case they’re called Helen. Even an years apart of several years, between two relatives, between a male and a woman, you can hear in the dialogue.

A Literary Mystery

The historical account of Riders was so perfectly characteristically Cooper it can’t possibly have been true, except it absolutely is true because London’s Evening Standard published a notice about it at the era: she completed the complete book in the early 70s, long before the early novels, brought it into the West End and misplaced it on a public transport. Some texture has been deliberately left out of this tale – what, for instance, was so crucial in the West End that you would abandon the sole version of your book on a train, which is not that unlike abandoning your baby on a railway? Surely an assignation, but what sort?

Cooper was prone to exaggerate her own messiness and haplessness