Jilly Cooper never broke America. Her myths do not travel, and when Disney+ wanted to serialise her work, they chose Rivals. This is about television in the 1980s – also, sex, money, trauma, big houses – and television has no hinterland. Cooper is 87 now. She began as a journalist, and has written 11 long novels, all rooted in an England of her fantasies. As the novels, which are collectively called the Rutshire Chronicles, wound on, she invented a village called Paradise. They aren’t subtle.
I interviewed her 20 years ago in her house in the Cotswolds: an embroidered sign on the front door said: “Go away”. Did she mean it? No interviewee has made me lunch before or sent me flowers after, but she did. She has good manners – superficially, the dominant characteristic of the British aristocrat – and journalists have, in return, wound protective spells around her. She is rarely criticised: she is barely even analysed. In this, we mirror her novels, in which she makes the nobility more interesting – and stupider – than it really is. People say Cooper’s novels are about sex, and the sex is hard to ignore. Rupert Campbell-Black, who appears in all eleven novels, has a “cock like a baseball bat. Used to bat bread rolls across the room with it when we were at school.”
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