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The celebrated author Jilly Cooper, who left us unexpectedly at the 88 years old, sold 11m copies of her many sweeping books over her five-decade career in writing. Adored by every sensible person over a certain age (45), she was presented to a younger audience last year with the streaming series adaptation of Rivals.

The Rutshire Chronicles

Cooper purists would have preferred to view the Rutshire chronicles in order: starting with Riders, originally published in the mid-80s, in which the character Rupert Campbell-Black, rogue, philanderer, horse rider, is debuts. But that’s a side note – what was notable about seeing Rivals as a box set was how effectively Cooper’s world had stood the test of time. The chronicles distilled the 1980s: the broad shoulders and bubble skirts; the obsession with class; the upper class sneering at the ostentatious newly wealthy, both dismissing everyone else while they snipped about how lukewarm their sparkling wine was; the intimate power struggles, with harassment and abuse so commonplace they were practically personas in their own right, a duo you could rely on to move the plot along.

While Cooper might have inhabited this period totally, she was never the classic fish not seeing the ocean because it’s all around. She had a empathy and an keen insight that you might not expect from listening to her speak. Every character, from the dog to the pony to her family to her French exchange’s brother, was always “absolutely sweet” – unless, that is, they were “truly heavenly”. People got assaulted and further in Cooper’s work, but that was never condoned – it’s remarkable how acceptable it is in many far more literary books of the time.

Social Strata and Personality

She was affluent middle-class, which for real-world terms meant that her dad had to earn an income, but she’d have characterized the strata more by their values. The bourgeoisie fretted about everything, all the time – what society might think, mostly – and the elite didn’t care a … well “such things”. She was raunchy, at times extremely, but her dialogue was never vulgar.

She’d recount her upbringing in storybook prose: “Father went to Dunkirk and Mother was deeply concerned”. They were both utterly beautiful, engaged in a lifelong love match, and this Cooper replicated in her own union, to a businessman of war books, Leo Cooper. She was 24, he was 27, the relationship wasn’t perfect (he was a unfaithful type), but she was always at ease giving people the recipe for a successful union, which is creaking bed springs but (key insight), they’re creaking with all the laughter. He avoided reading her books – he picked up Prudence once, when he had flu, and said it made him feel worse. She took no offense, and said it was mutual: she wouldn’t be seen dead reading battle accounts.

Always keep a journal – it’s very challenging, when you’re 25, to remember what twenty-four felt like

The Romance Series

Prudence (the late 70s) was the fifth volume in the Romance collection, which started with Emily in 1975. If you came to Cooper from the later works, having begun in Rutshire, the initial books, AKA “those ones named after posh girls” – also Bella and Harriet – were close but no cigar, every hero feeling like a test-run for the iconic character, every main character a little bit drippy. Plus, line for line (I haven’t actually run the numbers), there was less sex in them. They were a bit uptight on topics of decorum, women always worrying that men would think they’re immoral, men saying batshit things about why they preferred virgins (in much the same way, seemingly, as a real man always wants to be the first to open a jar of coffee). I don’t know if I’d suggest reading these books at a young age. I thought for a while that that is what posh people actually believed.

They were, however, extremely well-crafted, effective romances, which is considerably tougher than it sounds. You experienced Harriet’s surprise baby, Bella’s pissy in-laws, Emily’s Scottish isolation – Cooper could guide you from an all-is-lost moment to a jackpot of the emotions, and you could not once, even in the early days, pinpoint how she did it. At one moment you’d be chuckling at her incredibly close accounts of the bed linen, the subsequently you’d have emotional response and little understanding how they got there.

Authorial Advice

Asked how to be a writer, Cooper used to say the type of guidance that the famous author would have said, if he could have been arsed to guide a novice: use all 5 of your perceptions, say how things aromatic and looked and audible and felt and tasted – it greatly improves the narrative. But probably more useful was: “Constantly keep a journal – it’s very hard, when you’re 25, to remember what age 24 felt like.” That’s one of the initial observations you observe, in the more extensive, character-rich books, which have 17 heroines rather than just one, all with extremely posh names, unless they’re American, in which case they’re called a simple moniker. Even an generational gap of a few years, between two sisters, between a man and a lady, you can perceive in the dialogue.

The Lost Manuscript

The backstory of Riders was so pitch-perfectly Jilly Cooper it couldn't possibly have been accurate, except it definitely is factual because London’s Evening Standard published a notice about it at the time: she completed the entire draft in 1970, well before the early novels, carried it into the West End and left it on a bus. Some context has been deliberately left out of this tale – what, for example, was so significant in the West End that you would forget the sole version of your book on a bus, which is not that different from forgetting your child on a train? Surely an meeting, but which type?

Cooper was prone to exaggerate her own chaos and clumsiness