Jilly Cooper, who has died unexpectedly at the age of 88, sold 11m copies of her various epic books over her half-century of writing. Beloved of anyone with any sense over a certain age (45), she was introduced to a new generation last year with the Disney+ adaptation of Rivals.
Cooper purists would have preferred to watch the Rutshire chronicles in order: starting with Riders, first published in 1985, in which Rupert Campbell-Black, cad, heartbreaker, rider, is first introduced. But that’s a sidebar – what was striking about seeing Rivals as a box set was how well Cooper’s universe had aged. The chronicles distilled the 80s: the shoulder pads and puffball skirts; the obsession with class, aristocrats sneering at the Technicolored nouveau riche, both ignoring everyone else while they snipped about how warm their champagne was; the sexual politics, with harassment and assault so routine they were practically characters in their own right, a double act you could trust to move the plot along.
While Cooper might have inhabited this age completely, she was never the proverbial fish not noticing the ocean because it’s everywhere. She had a humanity and an observational intelligence that you maybe wouldn’t guess from listening to her speak. Everyone, from the dog to the pony to her parents to her French exchange’s brother, was always “absolutely sweet” – unless, that is, they were “absolutely divine”. People got groped and worse in Cooper’s work, but that was never OK – it’s surprising how OK it is in many far more literary books of the era.
She was upper-middle-class, which for practical purposes meant that her father had to work for a living, but she’d have described the classes more by their mores. The middle classes worried about everything, all the time – what other people might think, mainly – and the upper classes didn’t give a … well, she’d have said “stuff”. She was raunchy, at times incredibly so, but her language was never coarse.
She’d describe her family life in fairytale terms: “Daddy went to Dunkirk and Mummy was terribly, terribly worried” (this is a real thing she said, to Kirsty Young on Desert Island Discs). They were both utterly beautiful, engaged in a lifelong love match, and this Cooper replicated in her own marriage, to a publisher of military histories, Leo Cooper. She was 24, he was 27, the union wasn’t without hiccups (he was a bit of a shagger), but she was never less than comfortable giving people the formula for a happy marriage, which is creaking bed springs but (big reveal), they’re creaking with all the laughter. He never read her books – he read Prudence once, when he had flu, and said it made him feel worse. She didn’t mind, and said it was reciprocated: she wouldn’t be seen dead reading military history.
Prudence (1978) was the fifth book in the Romance series, which started with Emily in 1975. If you came to Cooper backwards, having started in Rutshire, the Romances, AKA “those ones named after posh girls” – also Imogen, Bella, Octavia and Harriet – were close but no cigar, every hero feeling like a test-run for Campbell-Black, every heroine a little bit drippy. Plus, page for page (I haven’t actually run the numbers, but just trust me), there wasn’t as much sex in them. They were a bit uptight on matters of modesty, women always worrying that men would think they’re loose, men saying batshit things about why they preferred virgins (in much the same way, apparently, as a real man always wants to be the first to open a jar of Nescafé). I don’t know if I’d recommend reading these novels at a formative age. I thought for a while that that’s what posh people really thought.
They were, however, incredibly tightly written, high-functioning romances, which is much harder than it sounds. You lived Harriet’s unwanted pregnancy, Bella’s pissy in-laws, Emily’s Scottish isolation – Cooper could take you from an all-is-lost moment to a lottery win of the heart, and you could never, even in the early days, put your finger on how she did it. One minute you’d be laughing at her incredibly close descriptions of the bed linen, the next you’d have tears in your eyes and no idea how they got there.
Asked how to be a writer, Cooper used to say the kind of thing that Ernest Hemingway would have said, if he could have been arsed to help out a novice: use all five of your senses, say how things smelled and looked and sounded and felt and tasted – it really lifts the prose. But probably more useful was: “Always keep a diary – it’s very hard, when you’re 25, to remember what being 24 felt like.” That’s one of the first things you notice, in the longer, more populated books, which have 17 heroines rather than just one, all with extremely posh names, unless they’re American, in which case they’re called Helen. Even an age difference of four years, between two sisters, between a man and a woman, you can hear in the dialogue.
The origin story of Riders was so pitch-perfectly Jilly Cooper it can’t possibly have been true, except it definitely is true because London’s Evening Standard ran an appeal about it at the time: she finished the whole manuscript in 1970, well before the Romances, took it into the West End and left it on a bus. Some texture has been deliberately left out of this story – what, for instance, 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 leaving your baby on a train? Surely an assignation, but what kind?
Cooper was wont to amp up her own chaos and haplessness – loved telling people, for instance, that she was fired from 22 jobs when she started working – and this was just a charming shortcut to put people at their ease since there was nothing ditzy about her. She had a mind like a mantrap. Anyway, the manuscript never did turn up and she was so devastated that it took her more than a decade to start again. Praise be that she did, because these books are absolutely fantastic.
The original cover of Riders has a guy’s hand on a woman’s jodhpurred butt, and one of them is carrying a riding crop, but it’s genuinely hard from the framing to figure out which – not uncharacteristic of her love arcs, actually. It’s never immediately obvious where they’ll land. To look at now, you’d think: that’s exactly the cover you’d expect a bonkbuster to have, but that’s because Jilly Cooper invented the bonkbuster (OK, fine, I’ll take your case for Jackie Collins, but some other time).
That look wasn’t a cliche when Riders did it, and was considered quite scandalous, particularly in the kind of Cotswolds bookshops where all Cooper’s characters would have actually bought their books, had they had any time to read, which they absolutely did not, because they were always, always shagging. The books were banned in the school library of Cooper’s daughter, Emily (not named, I don’t think, after the novel), until the author pointed out that those filthy books were paying for the school fees, whereupon they were unbanned.
By the late 80s, Jilly Cooper was known, everywhere, as sex-obsessed. Spitting Image had a puppet of her, which just popped up and said “sex sex sex sex sex”, and she found that hilarious, whereas in fact it was condescending and rude, and I’d like to see anyone involved in Spitting Image sell 11 million of anything. She used to tell people that was a hangover from an all-girls boarding school: it turned you boy-mad – a classic narrative-build from someone raised in the 1940s upper-middle-classes, because she absolutely hated boarding school and thought it was like a prison. Of course, it would be unspeakably crass to dwell on the trauma; much funnier to ogle the caretaker.
For my money, Rutshire should have ended at Polo (1991), a book so stunningly romantic that I can still start crying at the name “Perdita” and I sure as hell am not talking about Shakespeare’s one. The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous and Appassionata aren’t as good, and then we get into the exclamation mark titles (Score! Jump! Mount! Tackle! – that last written only two years ago, and it was flabby, but not gonna lie, I was happy to see the Campbell-Blacks again, even though Taggie had cancer).
Cooper started her career in journalism (she interviewed Harold Pinter once, but was more famous for raunchy short stories and columns) and had a massive, unexpected soft spot for journalists – all of us, it often seemed. If you ever wrote about her, she’d write you a little postcard – a friend got a wooden postcard of Banksy’s gun-toting panda. I wrote about my ardent admiration when she got her OBE in 2004, and got a little card saying, “Thank you, but I didn’t realise I was lowbrow”, and I felt bad about that but I’m medium-sure she was joking.
She was a magnificent storyteller who defies categorisation, having invented her own category. It’s impossible to say how she did it, but worth taking a look back at Riders to see if you can figure it out. It will take you eight hours, and you’ll need some champagne.
