Absolutely Exquisite! The Way Jilly Cooper Transformed the World – One Bonkbuster at a Time

Jilly Cooper, who passed away unexpectedly at the age of 88, sold eleven million copies of her many epic books over her 50-year literary career. Cherished by all discerning readers over a particular age (forty-five), she was introduced to a younger audience last year with the TV adaptation of Rivals.

The Rutshire Chronicles

Cooper purists would have wanted to watch the Rutshire chronicles in order: starting with Riders, originally published in 1985, in which the infamous Rupert Campbell-Black, rogue, charmer, rider, is initially presented. But that’s a sidebar – what was notable about watching Rivals as a binge-watch was how well Cooper’s universe had remained relevant. The chronicles encapsulated the 80s: the shoulder pads and bubble skirts; the obsession with class; aristocrats looking down on the Technicolored nouveau riche, both overlooking everyone else while they quibbled about how lukewarm their champagne was; the gender dynamics, with inappropriate behavior and abuse so everyday they were virtually characters in their own right, a duo you could rely on to drive the narrative forward.

While Cooper might have lived in this age totally, she was never the proverbial fish not noticing the ocean because it’s all around. She had a humanity and an observational intelligence that you maybe wouldn’t guess from hearing her talk. Every character, from the dog to the equine to her family to her foreign exchange sibling, was always “completely delightful” – unless, that is, they were “truly heavenly”. People got groped and worse in Cooper’s work, but that was never condoned – it’s surprising how acceptable it is in many far more literary books of the period.

Social Strata and Personality

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

She’d describe her upbringing in fairytale terms: “Daddy went to the war and Mummy was terribly, terribly worried”. They were both completely gorgeous, engaged in a eternal partnership, and this Cooper replicated in her own union, to a editor of war books, Leo Cooper. She was twenty-four, he was 27, the marriage wasn’t without hiccups (he was a philanderer), but she was always confident giving people the secret for a happy marriage, which is creaking bed springs but (crucial point), they’re creaking with all the joy. He never read her books – he tried Prudence once, when he had influenza, and said it made him feel worse. She took no offense, and said it was reciprocated: she wouldn’t be seen dead reading battle accounts.

Forever keep a diary – it’s very hard, when you’re 25, to recollect what age 24 felt like

Initial Novels

Prudence (1978) was the fifth book in the Romance collection, which started with Emily in the mid-70s. If you approached Cooper from the later works, having commenced in Rutshire, the initial books, also known as “the novels named after posh girls” – also Imogen and Harriet – were near misses, every male lead feeling like a prototype for the iconic character, every main character a little bit weak. Plus, page for page (I haven’t actually run the numbers), there wasn’t as much sex in them. They were a bit uptight on topics of propriety, women always being anxious that men would think they’re immoral, men saying ridiculous comments about why they favored virgins (in much the same way, seemingly, as a real man always wants to be the primary to open a jar of Nescafé). I don’t know if I’d advise reading these novels at a formative age. I thought for a while that that was what the upper class genuinely felt.

They were, however, remarkably precisely constructed, high-functioning romances, which is far more difficult than it seems. You experienced Harriet’s unplanned pregnancy, Bella’s annoying in-laws, Emily’s remote Scottish life – 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 beginning, identify how she managed it. One minute you’d be smiling at her highly specific descriptions of the bedding, the subsequently you’d have watery eyes and no idea how they appeared.

Authorial Advice

Asked how to be a author, Cooper used to say the type of guidance that Ernest Hemingway would have said, if he could have been bothered to help out a aspiring writer: employ all all of your senses, say how things aromatic and looked and heard and touched and palatable – it significantly enhances the prose. But likely more helpful was: “Forever keep a journal – it’s very hard, when you’re 25, to recollect 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 very upper-class names, unless they’re Stateside, in which case they’re called a common name. Even an generational gap of several years, between two sisters, between a man and a female, you can perceive in the speech.

The Lost Manuscript

The historical account of Riders was so perfectly Jilly Cooper it can’t possibly have been accurate, except it absolutely is real because a major newspaper made a public request about it at the era: she completed the entire draft in 1970, well before the Romances, brought it into the city center and left it on a public transport. Some detail has been purposely excluded of this story – what, for case, was so significant in the West End that you would abandon the sole version of your manuscript on a bus, which is not that unlike forgetting your baby on a train? Certainly an meeting, but which type?

Cooper was wont to embellish her own chaos and clumsiness