Her romances were so intelligent, raunchy and outrageously readable that she created her own category, bewitching generations of readers
J
illy Cooper, who has died unexpectedly at the age of 88, sold 11m copies of her various epic books over her half-century of writing. Beloved of anyone with any sense over a certain age (45), she was introduced to a new generation last year with the Disney+ adaptation of Rivals.
Cooper purists would have preferred to watch the Rutshire chronicles in order: starting with Riders, first published in 1985, in which Rupert Campbell-Black, cad, heartbreaker, rider, is first introduced. But that’s a sidebar – what was striking about seeing Rivals as a box set was how well Cooper’s universe had aged. The chronicles distilled the 80s: the shoulder pads and puffball skirts; the obsession with class, aristocrats sneering at the Technicolored nouveau riche, both ignoring everyone else while they snipped about how warm their champagne was; the sexual politics, with harassment and assault so routine they were practically characters in their own right, a double act you could trust to move the plot along.
While Cooper might have inhabited this age completely, she was never the proverbial fish not noticing the ocean because it’s everywhere. She had a humanity and an observational intelligence that you maybe wouldn’t guess from listening to her speak. Everyone, from the dog to the pony to her parents to her French exchange’s brother, was always “absolutely sweet” – unless, that is, they were “absolutely divine”. People got groped and worse in Cooper’s work, but that was never OK – it’s surprising how OK it is in many far more literary books of the era.
