10 Tackle! (2023)
In the last of Jilly Cooper’s Rutshire Chronicles – her epic, engrossing sagas of bucolic life among horse-riding poshos – Rupert Campbell-Black, template-handsome cad turned loving husband, is now (I did the maths) 67. Taggie has cancer, which is bracing, since the Chronicles as a whole rarely brush with mortality. I was astonished to learn that Cooper did 15 months of rewrites, following interventions from a sensitivity reader; it is not that sensitive, certainly not on class. Bianca, Rupert and Taggie’s daughter, has fallen in love with a footballer (“from the gu’er” – the Ts are silent) and her father buys a local club to keep them both in the postcode. Cue improbable league successes that make your heart soar.
Classic Jilly themes Underdogs triumph; dogs also triumph.
9 Appassionata (1996)
This is an interesting shadow-boxing instalment of the Campbell-Black saga. Rupert is barely in it, but his son Marcus – his son by his first wife, the panicky American Helen – is technically the love interest: he’s affianced to the heroine, violinist turned conductor Abigail Rosen, but it all capsizes when it turns out Marcus is gay and having an affair with a Russian ballet dancer. That doesn’t count as a spoiler, by the way, since pianist Marcus has been gay-coded as a thorn in his hyper-masculine father’s side since he was about two years old. That, besides the final romantic hero, Viking O’Neill, who is hot, is this overlong book’s salvation: Cooper is good on the peculiar familial cruelties of the English upper classes, the way they casually, irreparably screw their children’s lives just by caring too much about stupid things: do they have a high voice, do they eat asparagus right? There’s a lot of densely researched classical music, the result of three years’ field work with real live orchestras; if you skip all that, you can bring it down to a more manageable 400 pages.
Classic Jilly themes Artistic people are naturally hornier; also, horn players.
8 Octavia (1977)
This is a rare example of a bad-girl heroine. Rich, careless, selfish, spoilt Octavia steals her friends’ boyfriends and breaks their hearts (all of them) just because she can, until she meets her match in a salt-of-the-earth, wrong-side-of-the-tracks Gareth. Cooper subtitled this The Taming of the Shrew, but I’m going to stick my neck out and say Shakespeare’s portrait was much more feminist than this one, dealing in the elemental conflict between independence and intimacy. This is more of an Enid Blyton, tall-poppy-cut-down romp. It’s a cracking yarn, though, you can’t take that away from it.
Classic Jilly theme There’s a white knight for even the unlikeliest damsel.
7 The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous (1993)
This was the difficult fourth novel in the Rutshire series; Cooper thought the precinct was bigger than the hero, Rupert, and sidelines him in favour of Lysander Hawkley. He’s a difficult love interest: wives are paying for him to pretend to have affairs with them so their errant husbands return to uxorious form, or at least start picking their socks up. Sometimes he shags them as well, and in due course he falls in love, but it all feels a bit transactional. That was not Cooper’s vibe, for all that she was a woman of the world. She worshipped sex for its own sake, that’s one of the things that was great about her.
Classic Jilly theme Mothers and daughters in erotic contest.
6 Class: A View from Middle England (1979)
A nonfiction work centred around the lives and mores of fictional characters with determinative names: Harry Stow-Crat, Jen Teale, Mr and Mrs Nouveau-Richards. It’s like Dickens woke up after a lobotomy. The working-class caricature is not successful – it’s almost as if you have to know people in order to lampoon them – and I will never understand her animosity towards middle-class do-gooders leaning left; it’s not like we don’t also have sex and keep dogs. Her eye for the vanities and delusions of the upper classes, however, is David Attenborough sharp.
Classic Jilly theme There’s nothing more embarrassing than wanting to be posher than you are.
5 Jump! (2010)
In the ninth Rutshire novel, we encounter a familiar heroine; she doesn’t look like much, she has a surface flaw that makes most people walk straight by. She’s accorded the condescending respect of a “Mrs” by all who know her, despite never having married. But underneath, reader, even before you get to her heart of gold, there is fearsome beauty, poise and breeding. Plot twist: she’s a horse.
Classic Jilly theme Horses are basically humans, only better.
4 Imogen (1978)
The final novel in the so-called “Romance” series, known in lay parlance as “the short ones with Jilly on the cover” (distinct from the Rutshire Chronicles, “the long ones with the butts on the cover”), Imogen is where Cooper cuts away the husk and reaches the romantic kernel of each subsequent work: the self-effacing, overlooked heroine, who catches the hero’s eye for no reason she can possibly comprehend, and spends the rest of the novel wrestling hurdles epic and miniature, the greatest of which is always: “What can he possibly see in me?” He, in this case Nicky Beresford, is always sporty, in this case a tennis ace, usually famous, usually but not always rich, always insanely handsome, and she – well, her beauty surpasses all others’ as well, she just doesn’t know it.
Classic Jilly themes Journalists are sexier than tennis players; tennis players, still sexy.
3 Rivals (1988)
The second Rutshire, this is a scrum, character-wise, like a coach load of line-dancers arriving at an exquisitely choreographed masquerade ball. They’re not even all posh; some of them are Irish. Declan and Maud are actually not a bad stab at the doldrums of middle marriage, he devoted but inattentive, successful but chaotic, she thwarted and adulterous, solipsistic but as loving as she knows how to be. Their daughters Caitlin and Taggie are the romantic heart of the book (but not the Disney+ adaptation, where they all have main character energy, even Cameron the TV-biz hardass). It’s hard to tell, often, whether the cast of characters is too big, or if it’s the characters themselves. But you just have to go with it, because all that neon eventually floods the senses, in an exhilarating way, like Times Square.
Classic Jilly themes Cheap men are good with money; real men are bad with money.
2 Polo (1991)
There’s a huge role here, in the third Rutshire, for polo itself, not even the horses – though they have their own arcs – but the game, the rules, the stakes, the hovering spectre of Argentina, a giant nation in the background being richer and better at it. Ricky France-Lynch is the hero with the tragic backstory: he killed his own son and spent time in jail. Perdita is the heroine: troubled, beautiful, a huge polo talent; ordinarily she’d be a shoo-in for Rupert’s no-goodery (there is zero compunction about age difference in a Jilly Cooper, none. Perdita is 14 when we first meet her and she’s obsessed with Rupert, an adult), except – well, I don’t want to spoil it. The sporting triumphs are honestly nail-biting, the disasters, dismaying.
Classic Jilly theme True love blossoms when you’re concentrating on something else, preferably sport.
1 Riders (1985)
The first sighting of Rupert Campbell-Black, and what a complex character he is, which is to say, horrible. He’s horrible. He has a long-term showjumping rival in the form of Jake Lovell, but “rivals” is pushing it, since the backdrop is relentless schoolyard bullying, spurred by snobbery and racism (Lovell comes from poverty and is a Traveller, which is very much not what he’s called in the book). Rupert is basically a handsome version of Nigel Farage, with a horse. His only saving grace is that he’s kind to animals. I cannot account for his hold over the readers of this genre, myself included, except for the fact that the romance beats are so perfect: the chase, the catch, the highs, the lows, the many climaxes, the ungovernable human heart, the outrageousness of fortune, there really isn’t anyone who does this stuff better than Jilly Cooper.
Classic Jilly theme The heart wants what it wants.