Truly Heavenly! The Way Jilly Cooper Revolutionized the Literary Landscape – A Single Steamy Bestseller at a Time

The beloved novelist Jilly Cooper, who left us unexpectedly at the 88 years old, racked up sales of eleven million volumes of her various sweeping books over her half-century literary career. Cherished by anyone with any sense over a specific age (forty-five), she was brought to a younger audience last year with the TV adaptation of Rivals.

The Beloved Series

Devoted fans would have wanted to view the Rutshire chronicles in order: starting with Riders, first published in 1985, in which the character Rupert Campbell-Black, rogue, philanderer, rider, is debuts. But that’s a sidebar – what was notable about watching Rivals as a complete series was how well Cooper’s world had stood the test of time. The chronicles encapsulated the 80s: the broad shoulders and bubble skirts; the obsession with class; the upper class looking down on the Technicolored nouveau riche, both overlooking everyone else while they complained about how room-temperature their sparkling wine was; the gender dynamics, with harassment and misconduct so routine they were almost personas in their own right, a double act you could count on to move the plot along.

While Cooper might have occupied this age fully, she was never the proverbial fish not seeing the ocean because it’s everywhere. She had a humanity and an observational intelligence that you could easily miss from hearing her talk. Everyone, from the pet to the equine to her mother and father to her foreign exchange sibling, was always “utterly charming” – unless, that is, they were “absolutely divine”. People got harassed and further in Cooper’s work, but that was never acceptable – it’s astonishing how OK it is in many supposedly sophisticated books of the era.

Class and Character

She was upper-middle-class, which for real-world terms meant that her parent had to work for a living, but she’d have described the social classes more by their values. The middle classes fretted about everything, all the time – what other people might think, mostly – and the aristocracy didn’t care a … well “nonsense”. She was raunchy, at times very much, but her prose was always refined.

She’d describe her childhood in fairytale terms: “Daddy went to the war and Mother was deeply concerned”. They were both absolutely stunning, engaged in a enduring romance, and this Cooper emulated in her own union, to a editor of historical accounts, Leo Cooper. She was in her mid-twenties, he was 27, the union wasn’t without hiccups (he was a bit of a shagger), but she was never less than confident giving people the recipe for a blissful partnership, which is squeaky bed but (crucial point), they’re creaking with all the joy. He didn't read her books – he tried 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 spotted reading battle accounts.

Always keep a diary – it’s very challenging, when you’re 25, to remember what being 24 felt like

Initial Novels

Prudence (the late 70s) was the fifth book in the Romance novels, which began with Emily in 1975. If you came to Cooper backwards, having started in Rutshire, the early novels, alternatively called “those ones named after posh girls” – also Bella and Harriet – were close but no cigar, every male lead feeling like a prototype for Rupert, every heroine a little bit drippy. Plus, chapter for chapter (I can't verify statistically), there wasn’t as much sex in them. They were a bit conservative on matters of propriety, women always being anxious that men would think they’re loose, men saying batshit things about why they liked virgins (in much the same way, ostensibly, as a true gentleman always wants to be the initial to break a tin of instant coffee). I don’t know if I’d advise reading these books at a young age. I assumed for a while that that’s what posh people really thought.

They were, however, extremely precisely constructed, high-functioning romances, which is considerably tougher than it sounds. You felt Harriet’s unwanted pregnancy, Bella’s pissy family-by-marriage, Emily’s loneliness in Scotland – Cooper could guide you from an desperate moment to a lottery win of the heart, and you could not ever, even in the beginning, pinpoint how she managed it. Suddenly you’d be chuckling at her incredibly close depictions of the bed linen, the following moment you’d have watery eyes and little understanding how they got there.

Writing Wisdom

Questioned how to be a novelist, Cooper used to say the sort of advice that the famous author would have said, if he could have been inclined to help out a aspiring writer: use all 5 of your perceptions, say how things scented and appeared and heard and tactile and tasted – it significantly enhances the prose. But perhaps more practical was: “Forever keep a journal – it’s very difficult, when you’re twenty-five, to recall what age 24 felt like.” That’s one of the primary realizations you notice, in the more extensive, character-rich books, which have 17 heroines rather than just a single protagonist, all with extremely posh names, unless they’re Stateside, in which case they’re called Helen. Even an generational gap of several years, between two sisters, between a male and a woman, you can hear in the dialogue.

The Lost Manuscript

The origin story of Riders was so pitch-perfectly Jilly Cooper it couldn't possibly have been accurate, except it certainly was factual because London’s Evening Standard made a public request about it at the period: she wrote the entire draft in the early 70s, prior to the Romances, took it into the downtown and misplaced it on a bus. Some detail has been intentionally omitted of this tale – what, for instance, was so crucial in the city that you would leave the only copy of your book on a bus, which is not that far from leaving your child on a train? Certainly an assignation, but what kind?

Cooper was inclined to exaggerate her own messiness and haplessness