I stole my first Jilly Cooper from my stepmother. She spent summer holidays in the late 1980s supine on a sunbed, working on her tan while immersed in fat white paperbacks of Riders and Rivals. I smuggled both books home as contraband, knowing they would be confiscated by my mother as inappropriate for a barely teenaged girl.
Riders was Jilly’s first foray into the bonkbuster, a muddier, merrier take on the sex and shopping novels of Shirley Conran and Jackie Collins, set in the world of international show-jumping and starring that handsome, ruthless rake Rupert Campbell-Black. It went on to sell millions worldwide, and marked the beginning of the phenomenally successful Rutshire Chronicles, the 11th volume of which has just been published. Inevitably called Tackle!, it examines the fate of rival football teams, one of which is owned by RC-B, now putting the sex into sexagenarian.
I was hoping for glamour and romance, but what I hadn’t expected was how funny those books were, nor how densely populated with animals. My sister and I were animal mad, and Jilly’s novels were like gazing into a dream version of adulthood, full of gloriously messy Queen Anne houses populated by lolloping labradors and lurchers who always slept on the bed. Everyone spoke in puns, irrespective of their education or social background, quoting liberally from George Herbert and Dylan Thomas when their hearts were broken, which was often. Even now I can reel off lines gleaned from Cooper: “Who would have thought my shrivel’d heart / Could have recover’d greenness?” “And I rose / In rainy autumn / And walked abroad in a shower of all my days.”
Rupert was a louse in Riders. He beat up his horses, one of whom had to be rescued by a rival from hard labour in a stone quarry (my attempt to conceal what I was reading from my mother was busted by regularly waking her up sobbing at scenes of animals in distress). Rupert bullied and insulted everyone around him, particularly his beautiful, earnest wife, Helen, and only redeemed himself on page 885 by winning an Olympic team gold, jumping heroically with one arm in a sling, in agony from a trapped nerve (his exceptionally muscled thighs must have prevented him from falling off). His real transformation came in Rivals, when he fell in love with the angelic Taggie – “angelic” is a very Jilly word – who has dyslexia and is the chronically selfless daughter of his glamorous neighbours. Of course, he won her heart by giving her dog a Valentine.
The writer and publisher Leonard Woolf once mused on the mystery of bestsellers. They were made, he thought, by writers whose distinctive “psychological brew contains a touch of naivety, a touch of sentimentality, the story-telling gift, and a mysterious sympathy with the day-dreams of ordinary people.” All of this holds true for Jilly, who, like Jane Austen and Nancy Mitford, leavens moments of intense romantic sweetness with astringent social comedy.
One of the wellsprings that fed the Rutshire Chronicles was Class, Cooper’s beady account of social stratification and pretension, published in 1979 and itself an updating of Mitford’s 1954 essay The English Aristocracy, with its famous list of U and non-U words. If someone says quaite naice in a Jilly Cooper, chances are they’re a rotter, since attempting to ape the drawling upper classes is almost as serious a crime in Rutshire as drawing attention to it. Who can forget the ghastly Tony Baddingham, publicly shaming Valerie Jones for not knowing how to pronounce the Belvoir Hunt? Very non-U.
It’s fine to be a cockney millionaire, so long as you don’t wear brand-new tweeds to a shoot or start refaining your accent, but the best thing is to possess authentically Tory-blue blood. In Rivals, Rupert actually becomes a Tory minister, the favourite of a Thatcheresque PM (the diarist and MP Alan Clark is said to have been one of Cooper’s models, along with Andrew Parker Bowles). The leftwing are not, I think it’s fair to say, a source of much glamour in Rutshire. The men have moth-eaten beards and baby sick down their sweaters. The women are all feminist boots with unshaven legs, who preach sisterhood but let the side down by longing to shag Rupert. Speaking as a card-carrying lefty, I find this foray into Shire Tory ideology horribly fascinating. No wonder Rishi Sunak reads them.
Until Riders took off, Cooper was a journalist and the series is underpinned by a formidable corsetry of research. Each instalment is set in a different world, from show-jumping and television to polo, orchestras, racing and football. Though the plots have become increasingly convoluted and baroque (Score! marked a turning point, with its vast cast, culminating in a psychopath’s torture chamber), the world-building remains for the most part dense and meticulous.
This affinity for how real people do real things is at the heart of Cooper’s appeal. She possesses an extraordinary capacity for bedding her romantic fantasies in ordinary life. A stock scenario since her romance novels of the 1970s (Harriet, and Imogen, are the standouts) is the rescue of an unconfident or underappreciated woman. Her Cinderellas struggle with their diets and get spots from misery-gorging on chocolate bars. They have transformational haircuts (who can forget Fen’s urchin crop in Riders, or shy librarian Imogen’s dramatic metamorphosis on the Riviera?) and find true love with an aristocratic bachelor thanks to the kindness of their hearts and the unstintingness of their puns, not the perfection of their faces. If only Marx had realised that love is how you topple social hierarchy.
All this would be straight Mills & Boon were the books not so funny, so cuttingly observed and so pulsing with life. Over the decades, my sister and I have developed a Jilly Cooper bingo, comprised of our favourite elements. Lanes foaming with cow parsley. Supper of Sancerre and dover sole, or champagne and shepherd’s pie. Badger the labrador thumping his tail, a girl going scarlet thanks to an ill-chosen angora dress. A horse whickering incredulously. Rupert’s face very still, a muscle jumping in his cheek. London at dawn after a party, the chestnut trees holding up their pink and white candles. Two people catching each other’s eyes and collapsing with laughter: love in a nutshell, Cooper style.
• Tackle! by Jilly Cooper is published by Bantam. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
