Absolutely Exquisite! The Way Jilly Cooper Changed the World – A Single Bonkbuster at a Time

The beloved novelist Jilly Cooper, who left us unexpectedly at the 88 years old, achieved sales of 11m books of her many sweeping books over her half-century literary career. Beloved by all discerning readers over a particular age (mid-forties), she was introduced to a younger audience last year with the streaming series adaptation of Rivals.

Cooper's Fictional Universe

Cooper purists would have preferred to view the Rutshire chronicles in chronological order: commencing with Riders, first published in 1985, in which the character Rupert Campbell-Black, scoundrel, heartbreaker, horse rider, is first introduced. But that’s a side note – what was notable about viewing Rivals as a box set was how brilliantly Cooper’s fictional realm had aged. The chronicles captured the 80s: the power dressing and bubble skirts; the fixation on status; nobility sneering at the ostentatious newly wealthy, both overlooking everyone else while they snipped about how lukewarm their champagne was; the intimate power struggles, with unwanted advances and abuse so commonplace they were virtually characters in their own right, a double act you could count on to drive the narrative forward.

While Cooper might have occupied this era completely, she was never the proverbial fish not seeing the ocean because it’s everywhere. She had a compassion and an observational intelligence that you could easily miss from hearing her talk. All her creations, from the pet to the equine to her family to her foreign exchange sibling, was always “completely delightful” – unless, that is, they were “truly heavenly”. People got assaulted and more in Cooper’s work, but that was never OK – it’s surprising how tolerated it is in many supposedly sophisticated books of the era.

Background and Behavior

She was affluent middle-class, which for real-world terms meant that her parent had to hold down a job, but she’d have characterized the strata more by their mores. The bourgeoisie anxiously contemplated about every little detail, all the time – what others might think, primarily – and the upper classes didn’t give a … well “stuff”. She was spicy, at times extremely, but her prose was always refined.

She’d recount her childhood in fairytale terms: “Daddy went to the war and Mother was terribly, terribly worried”. They were both utterly beautiful, participating in a lifelong love match, and this Cooper replicated in her own marriage, to a publisher of war books, Leo Cooper. She was in her mid-twenties, he was twenty-seven, the marriage wasn’t without hiccups (he was a philanderer), but she was consistently confident giving people the formula for a successful union, which is noisy mattress but (big reveal), they’re squeaking with all the mirth. He never read her books – he read Prudence once, when he had a cold, and said it made him feel worse. She took no offense, and said it was reciprocated: she wouldn’t be seen dead reading battle accounts.

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

Initial Novels

Prudence (the late 70s) was the fifth installment in the Romance novels, which started with Emily in 1975. If you approached Cooper from the later works, having commenced in Rutshire, the initial books, AKA “the books named after posh girls” – also Bella and Harriet – were almost there, every hero feeling like a trial version for Campbell-Black, every main character a little bit weak. Plus, page for page (Without exact data), there wasn’t as much sex in them. They were a bit uptight on topics of decorum, women always fretting that men would think they’re promiscuous, men saying ridiculous comments about why they liked virgins (in much the same way, apparently, as a real man always wants to be the first to unseal a tin of instant coffee). I don’t know if I’d advise reading these books at a young age. I thought for a while that that was what affluent individuals genuinely felt.

They were, however, incredibly well-crafted, high-functioning romances, which is much harder than it seems. You felt Harriet’s surprise baby, Bella’s annoying relatives, Emily’s remote Scottish life – Cooper could guide you from an hopeless moment to a jackpot of the soul, and you could not ever, even in the initial stages, identify how she managed it. One minute you’d be laughing at her meticulously detailed depictions of the sheets, the subsequently you’d have watery eyes and little understanding how they got there.

Authorial Advice

Asked how to be a novelist, Cooper frequently advised the type of guidance that the literary giant would have said, if he could have been inclined to guide a aspiring writer: utilize all 5 of your faculties, say how things scented and seemed and audible and tactile and palatable – it really lifts the prose. But perhaps more practical was: “Forever keep a diary – it’s very hard, when you’re 25, to recall what age 24 felt like.” That’s one of the first things you detect, in the more detailed, more populated books, which have seventeen main characters rather than just one, all with extremely posh names, unless they’re American, in which case they’re called Helen. Even an generational gap of a few years, between two sisters, between a man and a woman, you can perceive in the speech.

The Lost Manuscript

The origin story of Riders was so exactly typical of the author it couldn't possibly have been true, except it absolutely is factual because a major newspaper published a notice about it at the period: she finished the complete book in 1970, long before the first books, took it into the city center and forgot it on a vehicle. Some texture has been deliberately left out of this story – what, for instance, was so crucial in the West End that you would forget the sole version of your manuscript on a train, which is not that far from leaving your infant on a transport? Certainly an meeting, but what sort?

Cooper was inclined to embellish her own messiness and ineptitude