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The beloved novelist Jilly Cooper, who died suddenly at the age of 88, achieved sales of 11m copies of her various sweeping books over her half-century career in writing. Cherished by every sensible person over a certain age (mid-forties), she was brought to a new generation last year with the TV adaptation of Rivals.

The Rutshire Chronicles

Devoted fans would have preferred to view the Rutshire chronicles in chronological order: commencing with Riders, initially released in 1985, in which the infamous Rupert Campbell-Black, rogue, heartbreaker, rider, is debuts. But that’s a side note – what was striking about seeing Rivals as a binge-watch was how effectively Cooper’s fictional realm had stood the test of time. The chronicles captured the 1980s: the broad shoulders and voluminous skirts; the obsession with class; aristocrats disdaining the flashy new money, both dismissing everyone else while they quibbled about how room-temperature their sparkling wine was; the gender dynamics, with harassment and abuse so commonplace they were almost characters in their own right, a double act you could count on to move the plot along.

While Cooper might have occupied this period fully, she was never the typical fish not noticing the ocean because it’s ubiquitous. She had a humanity and an keen insight that you might not expect from her public persona. Every character, from the pet to the equine to her family to her foreign exchange sibling, was always “utterly charming” – unless, that is, they were “truly heavenly”. People got groped and worse in Cooper’s work, but that was never OK – it’s remarkable how OK it is in many far more literary books of the time.

Class and Character

She was well-to-do, which for all intents and purposes meant that her parent had to hold down a job, but she’d have described the strata more by their values. The middle-class people worried about everything, all the time – what other people might think, mainly – and the upper classes didn’t give a … well “such things”. She was spicy, at times very much, but her prose was never vulgar.

She’d describe her upbringing in storybook prose: “Dad went to Dunkirk and Mom was terribly, terribly worried”. They were both completely gorgeous, engaged in a eternal partnership, and this Cooper mirrored in her own partnership, to a publisher of historical accounts, Leo Cooper. She was twenty-four, he was twenty-seven, the marriage wasn’t without hiccups (he was a philanderer), but she was never less than at ease giving people the formula for a happy marriage, which is noisy mattress but (crucial point), they’re squeaking with all the laughter. He avoided reading her books – he picked up Prudence once, when he had influenza, and said it made him feel more ill. She wasn't bothered, and said it was reciprocated: she wouldn’t be seen dead reading military history.

Constantly keep a diary – it’s very hard, when you’re 25, to remember what twenty-four felt like

Early Works

Prudence (1978) was the fifth volume in the Romance collection, which commenced with Emily in the mid-70s. If you discovered Cooper backwards, having begun in Rutshire, the Romances, also known as “those ones named after upper-class women” – also Bella and Harriet – were close but no cigar, every protagonist feeling like a trial version for Rupert, every heroine a little bit insipid. Plus, line for line (I haven’t actually run the numbers), there was less sex in them. They were a bit uptight on issues of modesty, women always fretting that men would think they’re immoral, men saying outrageous statements about why they liked virgins (comparably, seemingly, as a true gentleman always wants to be the initial to break a container of instant coffee). I don’t know if I’d advise reading these books at a formative age. I thought for a while that that’s what posh people genuinely felt.

They were, however, extremely precisely constructed, effective romances, which is much harder than it seems. You lived Harriet’s surprise baby, Bella’s pissy relatives, Emily’s remote Scottish life – Cooper could take you from an desperate moment to a lottery win of the emotions, and you could not ever, even in the initial stages, put your finger on how she achieved it. Suddenly you’d be laughing at her meticulously detailed depictions of the bedding, the following moment you’d have watery eyes and no idea how they got there.

Authorial Advice

Asked how to be a writer, Cooper would often state the type of guidance that Ernest Hemingway would have said, if he could have been bothered to help out a novice: employ all all of your faculties, say how things scented and seemed and sounded and felt and tasted – it really lifts the prose. But perhaps more practical was: “Always keep a notebook – it’s very hard, when you’re twenty-five, to recall what being 24 felt like.” That’s one of the first things you notice, in the more detailed, more populated books, which have numerous female leads rather than just a single protagonist, all with very upper-class names, unless they’re from the US, in which case they’re called Helen. Even an generational gap of four years, between two siblings, between a gentleman and a lady, you can detect in the dialogue.

A Literary Mystery

The historical account of Riders was so perfectly Jilly Cooper it can’t possibly have been real, except it absolutely is factual because London’s Evening Standard ran an appeal about it at the era: she wrote the entire draft in 1970, prior to the first books, carried it into the downtown and forgot it on a vehicle. Some detail has been intentionally omitted of this tale – what, for case, was so important in the West End that you would leave the only copy of your book on a bus, which is not that far from abandoning your child on a transport? Undoubtedly an assignation, but which type?

Cooper was inclined to exaggerate her own messiness and haplessness