Absolutely Divine! The Way Jilly Cooper Changed the World – One Steamy Bestseller at a Time

Jilly Cooper, who died suddenly at the 88 years old, racked up sales of 11 million books of her assorted grand books over her five-decade writing career. Beloved by anyone with any sense over a certain age (mid-forties), she was presented to a younger audience last year with the TV adaptation of Rivals.

The Beloved Series

Devoted fans would have wanted to watch the Rutshire chronicles in chronological order: starting with Riders, first published in 1985, in which Rupert Campbell-Black, rogue, heartbreaker, horse rider, is debuts. But that’s a side note – what was remarkable about seeing Rivals as a box set was how brilliantly Cooper’s world had stood the test of time. The chronicles encapsulated the 1980s: the power dressing and voluminous skirts; the fixation on status; aristocrats looking down on the flashy new money, both overlooking everyone else while they quibbled about how warm their bubbly was; the intimate power struggles, with unwanted advances and abuse so routine they were almost personas in their own right, a double act you could rely on to drive the narrative forward.

While Cooper might have inhabited this period totally, she was never the proverbial fish not perceiving the ocean because it’s ubiquitous. She had a compassion and an keen insight that you maybe wouldn’t guess from listening to her speak. Every character, from the pet to the equine to her mother and father to her international student's relative, was always “absolutely sweet” – unless, that is, they were “absolutely divine”. People got groped and further in Cooper’s work, but that was never condoned – it’s astonishing how OK it is in many more highbrow books of the era.

Social Strata and Personality

She was upper-middle-class, which for real-world terms meant that her parent had to earn an income, but she’d have defined the social classes more by their mores. The middle-class people fretted about all things, all the time – what society might think, mostly – and the upper classes didn’t care a … well “stuff”. She was risqué, at times very much, but her dialogue was never vulgar.

She’d describe her family life in fairytale terms: “Daddy went to Dunkirk and Mummy was terribly, terribly worried”. They were both absolutely stunning, involved in a lifelong love match, and this Cooper replicated in her own marriage, to a publisher of military histories, Leo Cooper. She was twenty-four, he was 27, the relationship wasn’t without hiccups (he was a bit of a shagger), but she was always confident giving people the formula for a happy marriage, which is noisy mattress but (big reveal), they’re noisy with all the joy. He avoided reading her books – he picked up Prudence once, when he had a cold, and said it made him feel unwell. She wasn't bothered, and said it was reciprocated: she wouldn’t be spotted reading war chronicles.

Always keep a journal – it’s very difficult, when you’re twenty-five, to recollect what age 24 felt like

Early Works

Prudence (1978) was the fifth installment in the Romance series, which started with Emily in 1975. If you approached Cooper from the later works, having commenced in the main series, the early novels, AKA “those ones named after posh girls” – also Imogen and Harriet – were almost there, every hero feeling like a prototype for Rupert, every main character a little bit insipid. Plus, chapter for chapter (I haven’t actually run the numbers), there wasn’t as much sex in them. They were a bit uptight on matters of propriety, women always being anxious that men would think they’re promiscuous, men saying outrageous statements about why they favored virgins (similarly, ostensibly, as a real man always wants to be the initial to open a container of Nescafé). I don’t know if I’d suggest reading these books at a formative age. I assumed for a while that that was what posh people genuinely felt.

They were, however, remarkably tightly written, effective romances, which is considerably tougher than it sounds. You lived Harriet’s surprise baby, Bella’s annoying relatives, Emily’s remote Scottish life – Cooper could guide you from an all-is-lost moment to a windfall of the soul, and you could not ever, even in the early days, identify how she did it. At one moment you’d be chuckling at her highly specific descriptions of the bed linen, the next you’d have tears in your eyes and little understanding how they appeared.

Writing Wisdom

Questioned how to be a writer, Cooper frequently advised the kind of thing that the literary giant would have said, if he could have been arsed to assist a novice: use all five of your faculties, say how things scented and seemed and sounded and touched and palatable – it really lifts the prose. But probably more useful was: “Constantly keep a diary – it’s very challenging, when you’re mid-twenties, to recall what twenty-four felt like.” That’s one of the initial observations you detect, in the more detailed, character-rich books, which have seventeen main characters rather than just a single protagonist, all with decidedly aristocratic names, unless they’re American, in which case they’re called a common name. Even an years apart of several years, between two siblings, between a man and a woman, you can detect in the conversation.

An Author's Tale

The backstory of Riders was so perfectly Jilly Cooper it couldn't possibly have been accurate, except it certainly was factual because a major newspaper made a public request about it at the era: she wrote the entire draft in 1970, well before the first books, brought it into the city center and left it on a bus. Some texture has been intentionally omitted of this story – what, for example, was so significant in the urban area that you would abandon the unique draft of your novel on a bus, which is not that different from forgetting your child on a railway? Certainly an assignation, but what kind?

Cooper was inclined to embellish her own chaos and ineptitude