Truly Heavenly! The Way Jilly Cooper Transformed the Literary Landscape – A Single Bonkbuster at a Time

The celebrated author Jilly Cooper, who died suddenly at the age of 88, racked up sales of eleven million books of her various sweeping books over her half-century career in writing. Cherished by every sensible person over a particular age (45), she was brought to a modern audience last year with the streaming series adaptation of Rivals.

Cooper's Fictional Universe

Longtime readers would have wanted to watch the Rutshire chronicles in chronological order: commencing with Riders, first published in the mid-80s, in which Rupert Campbell-Black, scoundrel, heartbreaker, rider, is debuts. But that’s a sidebar – what was striking about viewing Rivals as a complete series was how brilliantly Cooper’s world had remained relevant. The chronicles captured the eighties: the power dressing and bubble skirts; the fixation on status; aristocrats disdaining the flashy new money, both overlooking everyone else while they snipped about how room-temperature their champagne was; the intimate power struggles, with unwanted advances and abuse so everyday they were virtually characters in their own right, a double act you could count on to advance the story.

While Cooper might have lived in this era fully, she was never the proverbial fish not seeing the ocean because it’s all around. She had a humanity and an perceptive wisdom that you could easily miss from her public persona. Every character, from the canine to the horse to her family to her international student's relative, was always “absolutely sweet” – unless, that is, they were “absolutely divine”. People got harassed and further in Cooper’s work, but that was never acceptable – it’s surprising how tolerated it is in many more highbrow books of the period.

Background and Behavior

She was well-to-do, which for real-world terms meant that her parent had to earn an income, but she’d have characterized the strata more by their mores. The middle classes fretted about everything, all the time – what other people might think, mainly – and the elite didn’t give a … well “nonsense”. She was risqué, at times incredibly so, but her language was never vulgar.

She’d recount her childhood in storybook prose: “Daddy went to battle and Mummy was extremely anxious”. They were both utterly beautiful, participating in a lifelong love match, and this Cooper mirrored in her own union, to a businessman 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 never less than confident giving people the formula for a blissful partnership, which is creaking bed springs but (big reveal), they’re squeaking with all the joy. He never read her books – he read Prudence once, when he had influenza, and said it made him feel unwell. She didn’t mind, and said it was mutual: she wouldn’t be caught reading battle accounts.

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

The Romance Series

Prudence (the late 70s) was the fifth volume in the Romance novels, which started with Emily in 1975. If you discovered Cooper in reverse, having started in Rutshire, the early novels, AKA “those ones named after posh girls” – also Octavia and Harriet – were close but no cigar, every hero feeling like a prototype for the iconic character, every female lead a little bit drippy. Plus, chapter for chapter (Without exact data), there was less sex in them. They were a bit reserved on issues of propriety, women always fretting that men would think they’re promiscuous, men saying batshit things about why they favored virgins (similarly, seemingly, as a real man always wants to be the first to open a container of coffee). I don’t know if I’d suggest reading these stories at a young age. I thought for a while that that is what affluent individuals actually believed.

They were, however, extremely tightly written, successful romances, which is considerably tougher than it sounds. You felt Harriet’s surprise baby, Bella’s pissy family-by-marriage, Emily’s loneliness in Scotland – Cooper could take you from an hopeless moment to a jackpot of the heart, and you could not ever, even in the initial stages, put your finger on how she managed it. At one moment you’d be chuckling at her incredibly close depictions of the sheets, the subsequently you’d have tears in your eyes and no idea how they appeared.

Writing Wisdom

Asked how to be a novelist, Cooper frequently advised the kind of thing that the famous author would have said, if he could have been inclined to assist a aspiring writer: utilize all 5 of your perceptions, say how things scented and seemed and audible and touched and tasted – it really lifts the writing. But probably more useful was: “Forever keep a journal – it’s very challenging, when you’re twenty-five, to recollect what age 24 felt like.” That’s one of the first things you detect, in the more detailed, more populated books, which have 17 heroines rather than just one, all with decidedly aristocratic names, unless they’re American, in which case they’re called a simple moniker. Even an years apart of four years, between two sisters, between a gentleman and a female, you can hear in the speech.

An Author's Tale

The origin story of Riders was so exactly characteristically Cooper it might not have been accurate, except it absolutely is real because a London paper ran an appeal about it at the time: she wrote the entire draft in the early 70s, prior to the Romances, took it into the West End and misplaced it on a bus. Some context has been purposely excluded of this anecdote – what, for case, was so crucial in the West End that you would leave the unique draft of your novel on a train, which is not that unlike forgetting your baby on a transport? Surely an rendezvous, but which type?

Cooper was prone to amp up her own chaos and ineptitude