Absolutely Exquisite! The Way Jilly Cooper Transformed the World – A Single Racy Novel at a Time

The beloved novelist Jilly Cooper, who left us unexpectedly at the 88 years old, sold eleven million copies of her many sweeping books over her half-century career in writing. Adored by every sensible person over a specific age (mid-forties), she was presented to a modern audience last year with the Disney+ adaptation of Rivals.

The Beloved Series

Longtime readers would have preferred to view the Rutshire chronicles in order: starting with Riders, first published in 1985, in which the infamous Rupert Campbell-Black, cad, heartbreaker, horse rider, is first introduced. But that’s a sidebar – what was notable about watching Rivals as a box set was how well Cooper’s fictional realm had stood the test of time. The chronicles captured the 1980s: the broad shoulders and bubble skirts; the fixation on status; the upper class looking down on the ostentatious newly wealthy, both overlooking everyone else while they quibbled about how room-temperature their sparkling wine was; the sexual politics, with inappropriate behavior and assault so routine they were virtually characters in their own right, a pair you could rely on to drive the narrative forward.

While Cooper might have occupied this period 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 her public persona. Every character, from the pet to the pony to her mother and father to her international student's relative, was always “absolutely sweet” – unless, that is, they were “completely exquisite”. People got assaulted and more in Cooper’s work, but that was never condoned – it’s remarkable how acceptable it is in many supposedly sophisticated books of the era.

Class and Character

She was affluent middle-class, which for practical purposes meant that her father had to hold down a job, but she’d have described the social classes more by their mores. The middle-class people anxiously contemplated about everything, all the time – what others might think, mostly – and the elite didn’t care a … well “stuff”. She was raunchy, at times very much, but her dialogue was never coarse.

She’d describe her family life in idyllic language: “Daddy went to the war and Mummy was terribly, terribly worried”. They were both utterly beautiful, engaged in a enduring romance, and this Cooper replicated in her own union, to a businessman of military histories, Leo Cooper. She was twenty-four, he was 27, the union wasn’t perfect (he was a philanderer), but she was never less than confident giving people the formula for a successful union, which is squeaky bed but (crucial point), they’re squeaking with all the mirth. He never read her books – he tried Prudence once, when he had flu, and said it made him feel more ill. She took no offense, and said it was reciprocated: she wouldn’t be caught reading military history.

Constantly keep a diary – it’s very hard, when you’re mid-twenties, to recollect what age 24 felt like

The Romance Series

Prudence (1978) was the fifth volume in the Romance series, which began with Emily in the mid-70s. If you approached Cooper from the later works, having started in her later universe, the Romances, alternatively called “the novels named after affluent ladies” – 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, chapter for chapter (I can't verify statistically), there wasn't the same quantity of sex in them. They were a bit conservative on topics of propriety, women always being anxious that men would think they’re promiscuous, men saying ridiculous comments about why they liked virgins (comparably, ostensibly, as a genuine guy always wants to be the primary to unseal a tin of instant coffee). I don’t know if I’d advise reading these books at a impressionable age. I thought for a while that that was what affluent individuals really thought.

They were, however, incredibly precisely constructed, effective romances, which is far more difficult than it appears. You lived Harriet’s surprise baby, Bella’s pissy in-laws, Emily’s loneliness in Scotland – Cooper could take you from an all-is-lost moment to a lottery win of the soul, and you could not ever, even in the initial stages, identify how she did it. At one moment you’d be laughing at her incredibly close descriptions of the sheets, the subsequently you’d have tears in your eyes and no idea how they arrived.

Authorial Advice

Asked how to be a author, Cooper frequently advised the sort of advice that the famous author would have said, if he could have been arsed to help out a aspiring writer: employ all 5 of your senses, say how things scented and seemed and heard and touched and tasted – it greatly improves the writing. But likely more helpful was: “Always keep a diary – it’s very hard, when you’re mid-twenties, to recollect what being 24 felt like.” That’s one of the primary realizations you observe, in the more detailed, densely peopled books, which have 17 heroines rather than just one, all with extremely posh names, unless they’re Stateside, in which case they’re called a simple moniker. Even an generational gap of several years, between two siblings, between a man and a lady, you can detect in the conversation.

A Literary Mystery

The historical account of Riders was so pitch-perfectly Jilly Cooper it couldn't possibly have been true, except it absolutely is true because a major newspaper made a public request about it at the era: she finished the whole manuscript in the early 70s, long before the first books, brought it into the city center and misplaced it on a bus. Some texture has been deliberately left out of this tale – what, for instance, was so significant in the city that you would forget the unique draft of your manuscript on a train, which is not that far from forgetting your child on a railway? Undoubtedly an meeting, but which type?

Cooper was prone to amp up her own disorder and ineptitude