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

The celebrated author Jilly Cooper, who passed away unexpectedly at the 88 years old, sold 11 million copies of her many grand books over her 50-year career in writing. Beloved by anyone with any sense over a specific age (45), she was brought to a younger audience last year with the TV adaptation of Rivals.

The Rutshire Chronicles

Longtime readers would have liked to watch the Rutshire chronicles in sequence: beginning with Riders, originally published in 1985, in which the character Rupert Campbell-Black, scoundrel, charmer, rider, is initially presented. But that’s a sidebar – what was striking about seeing Rivals as a binge-watch was how effectively Cooper’s world had remained relevant. The chronicles captured the eighties: the power dressing and bubble skirts; the fixation on status; nobility sneering at the Technicolored nouveau riche, both ignoring everyone else while they complained about how lukewarm their sparkling wine was; the intimate power struggles, with inappropriate behavior and misconduct so commonplace they were practically personas in their own right, a duo you could trust to drive the narrative forward.

While Cooper might have occupied this period fully, she was never the proverbial fish not noticing the ocean because it’s everywhere. She had a empathy and an keen insight that you could easily miss from listening to her speak. Everyone, from the canine to the equine to her parents to her French exchange’s brother, was always “absolutely sweet” – unless, that is, they were “truly heavenly”. People got assaulted and more in Cooper’s work, but that was never acceptable – it’s remarkable how acceptable it is in many supposedly sophisticated books of the period.

Class and Character

She was affluent middle-class, which for real-world terms meant that her parent had to earn an income, but she’d have described the strata more by their values. The middle-class people anxiously contemplated about every little detail, all the time – what society might think, mostly – and the upper classes didn’t care a … well “such things”. She was raunchy, at times incredibly so, but her dialogue was never coarse.

She’d recount her childhood in idyllic language: “Daddy went to Dunkirk and Mummy was terribly, terribly worried”. They were both completely gorgeous, engaged in a eternal partnership, and this Cooper mirrored in her own union, to a editor of historical accounts, Leo Cooper. She was twenty-four, he was in his late twenties, the relationship wasn’t smooth sailing (he was a philanderer), but she was never less than confident giving people the secret for a blissful partnership, which is squeaky bed but (big reveal), they’re creaking with all the joy. He avoided reading her books – he tried Prudence once, when he had a cold, and said it made him feel unwell. She didn’t mind, and said it was reciprocated: she wouldn’t be seen dead reading battle accounts.

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

Initial Novels

Prudence (1978) was the fifth book in the Romance series, which started with Emily in 1975. If you approached Cooper backwards, having commenced in Rutshire, the Romances, alternatively called “the novels named after affluent ladies” – also Octavia and Harriet – were near misses, every protagonist feeling like a prototype for the iconic character, every main character a little bit insipid. Plus, page for page (I haven’t actually run the numbers), there wasn't the same quantity of sex in them. They were a bit uptight on issues of modesty, women always worrying that men would think they’re promiscuous, men saying outrageous statements about why they liked virgins (in much the same way, apparently, as a real man always wants to be the first to break a container of coffee). I don’t know if I’d advise reading these books at a formative age. I thought for a while that that’s what affluent individuals actually believed.

They were, however, remarkably precisely constructed, effective romances, which is considerably tougher than it sounds. You lived Harriet’s unwanted pregnancy, Bella’s annoying in-laws, Emily’s Scottish isolation – Cooper could transport you from an hopeless moment to a windfall of the emotions, and you could not once, even in the early days, pinpoint how she managed it. At one moment you’d be smiling at her meticulously detailed accounts of the bedding, the subsequently you’d have emotional response and little understanding how they got there.

Literary Guidance

Questioned how to be a novelist, Cooper would often state the type of guidance that Ernest Hemingway would have said, if he could have been bothered to assist a novice: utilize all all of your senses, say how things smelled and seemed and audible and tactile and tasted – it greatly improves the writing. But likely more helpful was: “Always keep a diary – it’s very hard, when you’re twenty-five, to recollect what being 24 felt like.” That’s one of the primary realizations you observe, in the more extensive, more populated books, which have seventeen main characters rather than just a single protagonist, all with decidedly aristocratic names, unless they’re Stateside, in which case they’re called a simple moniker. Even an age difference of several years, between two siblings, between a male and a lady, you can hear in the conversation.

The Lost Manuscript

The origin story of Riders was so pitch-perfectly Jilly Cooper it might not have been true, except it absolutely is true because London’s Evening Standard ran an appeal about it at the time: she wrote the entire draft in 1970, prior to the Romances, took it into the city center and forgot it on a vehicle. Some context has been deliberately left out of this anecdote – what, for instance, was so important in the urban area that you would abandon the unique draft of your book on a bus, which is not that different from leaving your infant on a transport? Certainly an assignation, but what kind?

Cooper was prone to exaggerate her own chaos and haplessness