Utterly Heavenly! The Way Jilly Cooper Revolutionized the Literary Landscape – One Steamy Bestseller at a Time

The beloved novelist Jilly Cooper, who left us unexpectedly at the 88 years of age, racked up sales of 11m volumes of her various epic books over her five-decade literary career. Cherished by all discerning readers over a certain age (forty-five), she was introduced to a younger audience last year with the streaming series adaptation of Rivals.

Cooper's Fictional Universe

Longtime readers would have liked to watch the Rutshire chronicles in order: starting with Riders, initially released in the mid-80s, in which the character Rupert Campbell-Black, cad, heartbreaker, equestrian, is first introduced. But that’s a sidebar – what was remarkable about watching Rivals as a box set was how brilliantly Cooper’s world had remained relevant. The chronicles encapsulated the eighties: the shoulder pads and voluminous skirts; the obsession with class; aristocrats disdaining the ostentatious newly wealthy, both overlooking everyone else while they complained about how warm their bubbly was; the intimate power struggles, with inappropriate behavior and assault so everyday they were almost characters in their own right, a duo you could count on to advance the story.

While Cooper might have occupied this era fully, she was never the typical fish not noticing the ocean because it’s ubiquitous. She had a empathy and an perceptive wisdom that you could easily miss from listening to her speak. All her creations, from the dog to the pony to her mother and father to her foreign exchange sibling, was always “utterly charming” – unless, that is, they were “truly heavenly”. People got assaulted and worse in Cooper’s work, but that was never OK – it’s astonishing how OK it is in many far more literary books of the time.

Social Strata and Personality

She was upper-middle-class, which for real-world terms meant that her dad had to hold down a job, but she’d have defined the classes more by their mores. The middle-class people worried about all things, all the time – what other people might think, mainly – and the upper classes didn’t care a … well “stuff”. She was risqué, at times incredibly so, but her language was never vulgar.

She’d recount her childhood in idyllic language: “Father went to the war and Mom was terribly, terribly worried”. They were both absolutely stunning, participating in a eternal partnership, and this Cooper emulated in her own union, to a editor of historical accounts, Leo Cooper. She was in her mid-twenties, he was in his late twenties, the relationship wasn’t without hiccups (he was a unfaithful type), but she was consistently at ease giving people the secret for a blissful partnership, which is creaking bed springs but (crucial point), they’re squeaking with all the laughter. He didn't read her books – he picked up Prudence once, when he had influenza, and said it made him feel unwell. She took no offense, and said it was mutual: she wouldn’t be spotted reading war chronicles.

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

The Romance Series

Prudence (1978) was the fifth installment in the Romance novels, which started with Emily in the mid-70s. If you came to Cooper backwards, having started in Rutshire, the early novels, alternatively called “the novels named after upper-class women” – also Octavia and Harriet – were near misses, every protagonist feeling like a prototype for the iconic character, every female lead a little bit insipid. Plus, page for page (I haven’t actually run the numbers), there was less sex in them. They were a bit conservative on issues of propriety, women always fretting that men would think they’re loose, men saying batshit things about why they preferred virgins (comparably, apparently, as a real man always wants to be the primary to break a tin of coffee). I don’t know if I’d recommend reading these stories at a impressionable age. I believed for a while that that is what posh people actually believed.

They were, however, incredibly well-crafted, effective romances, which is far more difficult than it seems. You lived Harriet’s unplanned pregnancy, Bella’s pissy family-by-marriage, Emily’s remote Scottish life – Cooper could guide you from an hopeless moment to a lottery win of the heart, and you could not ever, even in the beginning, put your finger on how she achieved it. Suddenly you’d be laughing at her meticulously detailed accounts of the bedding, the next you’d have emotional response and little understanding how they got there.

Authorial Advice

Questioned how to be a author, Cooper frequently advised the type of guidance that the literary giant would have said, if he could have been inclined to guide a novice: use all 5 of your faculties, say how things aromatic and looked and heard and touched and flavored – it greatly improves the narrative. But likely more helpful was: “Forever keep a journal – it’s very difficult, when you’re mid-twenties, to recall what being 24 felt like.” That’s one of the initial observations you observe, in the more detailed, more populated books, which have seventeen main characters rather than just one lead, all with extremely posh names, unless they’re Stateside, in which case they’re called Helen. Even an years apart of four years, between two sisters, between a man and a female, you can detect in the dialogue.

An Author's Tale

The historical account of Riders was so pitch-perfectly Jilly Cooper it can’t possibly have been true, except it certainly was factual because a London paper published a notice about it at the era: she finished the entire draft in 1970, long before the Romances, took it into the West End and misplaced it on a public transport. Some detail has been intentionally omitted of this tale – what, for instance, was so significant in the West End that you would leave the sole version of your book on a train, which is not that different from forgetting your child on a transport? Undoubtedly an meeting, but what kind?

Cooper was prone to amp up her own messiness and haplessness