Utterly Exquisite! How Jilly Cooper Transformed the World – A Single Steamy Bestseller at a Time

The beloved novelist Jilly Cooper, who left us unexpectedly at the 88 years of age, achieved sales of 11m copies of her various epic books over her five-decade career in writing. Beloved by all discerning readers over a particular age (45), she was presented to a younger audience last year with the streaming series adaptation of Rivals.

Cooper's Fictional Universe

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, cad, heartbreaker, equestrian, is debuts. But that’s a minor point – what was striking about viewing Rivals as a binge-watch was how brilliantly Cooper’s world had remained relevant. The chronicles distilled the eighties: the shoulder pads 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 intimate power struggles, with unwanted advances and misconduct so commonplace they were practically personas in their own right, a double act you could rely on to drive the narrative forward.

While Cooper might have inhabited this period completely, she was never the classic fish not noticing the ocean because it’s everywhere. She had a compassion and an keen insight that you maybe wouldn’t guess from her public persona. Everyone, from the dog to the equine to her parents to her international student's relative, was always “utterly charming” – unless, that is, they were “truly heavenly”. People got harassed and further in Cooper’s work, but that was never condoned – it’s astonishing how acceptable it is in many far more literary books of the time.

Background and Behavior

She was well-to-do, which for real-world terms meant that her dad had to hold down a job, but she’d have defined the social classes more by their values. The bourgeoisie worried about every little detail, all the time – what others might think, mostly – and the elite didn’t care a … well “nonsense”. She was risqué, at times incredibly so, but her dialogue was always refined.

She’d describe her family life in fairytale terms: “Father went to battle and Mom was deeply concerned”. They were both absolutely stunning, engaged in a eternal partnership, and this Cooper replicated in her own union, to a businessman of war books, Leo Cooper. She was in her mid-twenties, he was 27, the relationship wasn’t without hiccups (he was a philanderer), but she was never less than confident giving people the secret for a happy marriage, which is noisy mattress but (key insight), they’re noisy with all the joy. He didn't read her books – he tried Prudence once, when he had flu, and said it made him feel unwell. She wasn't bothered, and said it was reciprocated: she wouldn’t be seen dead reading battle accounts.

Forever keep a notebook – it’s very hard, when you’re mid-twenties, to recollect what being 24 felt like

Early Works

Prudence (1978) was the fifth book in the Romance series, which started with Emily in 1975. If you approached Cooper backwards, having commenced in the main series, the Romances, also known as “the novels named after affluent ladies” – also Bella and Harriet – were close but no cigar, every protagonist feeling like a test-run for Campbell-Black, every female lead a little bit weak. Plus, chapter for chapter (I haven’t actually run the numbers), there was less sex in them. They were a bit uptight on matters of modesty, women always being anxious that men would think they’re loose, men saying ridiculous comments about why they liked virgins (in much the same way, apparently, as a true gentleman always wants to be the initial to unseal a jar of Nescafé). I don’t know if I’d recommend reading these stories at a formative age. I assumed for a while that that is what affluent individuals really thought.

They were, however, remarkably tightly written, high-functioning romances, which is considerably tougher than it appears. You experienced Harriet’s unplanned pregnancy, Bella’s pissy in-laws, Emily’s Scottish isolation – Cooper could take you from an hopeless moment to a windfall of the heart, and you could not ever, even in the beginning, put your finger on how she managed it. At one moment you’d be laughing at her incredibly close depictions of the bed linen, the next you’d have tears in your eyes and uncertainty how they arrived.

Authorial Advice

Asked how to be a author, Cooper frequently advised the type of guidance that Ernest Hemingway would have said, if he could have been inclined to guide a beginner: employ all all of your senses, say how things smelled and appeared and sounded and touched and palatable – it really lifts the prose. But perhaps more practical was: “Forever keep a diary – it’s very difficult, when you’re twenty-five, to recall what age 24 felt like.” That’s one of the primary realizations you detect, in the more detailed, more populated books, which have numerous female leads rather than just a single protagonist, all with extremely posh names, unless they’re Stateside, in which case they’re called a common name. Even an generational gap of a few years, between two sisters, between a male and a woman, you can detect in the conversation.

An Author's Tale

The historical account of Riders was so perfectly characteristically Cooper it might not have been true, except it absolutely is true because a London paper published a notice about it at the era: she completed the entire draft in 1970, prior to the early novels, brought it into the downtown and forgot it on a vehicle. Some texture has been deliberately left out of this tale – what, for instance, was so crucial in the urban area that you would forget the only copy of your novel on a bus, which is not that different from abandoning your infant on a train? Undoubtedly an meeting, but which type?

Cooper was prone to exaggerate her own messiness and ineptitude