Re-reading Jilly Cooper in Midlife

Anyone who knows me well is receiving daily commentary on my current re-read of the Jilly Cooper novels. I say re-read; I am not sure I rigorously ploughed through all of them in my younger years, but I was certainly aware of the cultural world presented in the books, and of Dame Jilly herself, who lived in my peripheral vision, sporting her eponymous shag hairdo. I was born in '74 and came of age in the late 80's/early 90's, so my childhood and teenage-hood in rural Sussex did, in some ways, correlate to the fictional world of the Rutshire Chronicles, presented in 'Riders', 'Rivals' and 'Polo'. At school, I sought out the heavyweights of literature and did not admit to loving this type of book as I was meant to want a 'serious' education, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't secretly fascinated by the whole scene. Who wasn't?! Rupert Campbell Black in tight britches. I mean, really.

I also focused my attentions on other 80's titles like 'Lace' by Shirley Conran (which I virtually knew cover-to-cover), the Jackie Collins novels (Lucky Santangelo; you had my heart), and 'The Thorn Birds' by Colleen McCullough (RIP to the screen idol Richard Chamberlain who died just last week). All of these held similar importance at the time and I, as a teen, devoured them. In retrospect, as I think of it now, I see that reading this genre formed my views on many, many things. This has been revealing as I revisit the books in midlife, as I understand where my definitions of marriage, love, sexuality and motherhood might have came from. I had one of those 1980's childhoods where I was on my own a lot. There was no social media. My spare time was spent watching American TV and reading. Nowadays, there is an acute understanding of the role of cultural influence. Re-reading Jilly Cooper, I got a sense of nostalgic comfort even though on the surface they consist of romping, implausible plot-lines and through-the-keyhole glimpses into the lives of the rich and infamous. But what has struck me the most is how broadly Cooper has represented the experience of women. It is both pleasurable and horrifying and I have come to consider why I find it so.

In the early novels the women are presented as being somewhat haphazard but universally beautiful and beguiling. To men, they are like catnip and their attractiveness is what drives the narrative along like a steam train. 'I must have her' is the life-force of the plot and she might be either unwilling or unable to accept his advances. Nonetheless, the man blatantly pursues her. He will not stop and she will eventually succumb. This, it seems to me, pinpoints a key element of heterosexual relationships that is now the subject of such disdain. Men want to win. And women are no longer comfortable with them winning. The fundamental basis of male/female relationships remains the same; men chase and women (according to these novels) like it. Jilly was not worrying about whether people would be offended by her words. She was not acknowledging her own privilege. She did not couch every scene with the caveat that it might or might not trigger someone. She wrote unashamedly and that is why I have found her such a delight to read.

Some of the women depicted do not consider the man of sufficient standing to warrant reciprocation. This is described as being down to money or social standing. Women must be pretty and men must be rich. These concepts, when woven in to the storyline are so obvious and relatable that even though the novels are set some thirty or forty years ago, they still, obscurely, ring true. Invariably, the women will be wearing figure-hugging fine-knit dresses that accentuate curves (these horse-riding girls are not skinny waifs; they are proper-sized women) or a natty jumpsuit with a cinched-in waist. Hair is a big factor, as are bosoms and bottoms. Jilly Cooper writes a veritable celebration of the female form, presented openly for the male gaze. This is, of course, problematic when we read it today. But how dull it feels to not enjoy the romp. How sanitising. How exciting it was for these female characters to be properly and explicitly wooed. The sexualisation of women is shocking, but at the same time there is a reverence to the feminine form. Cooper stealthily puts these representations of femininity in front of us for forensic study; after all each novel is over 900 pages long.

There is also, almost always, a harried but quietly hot writer in the plot who is trying to finish her book and/or file her copy with the newspaper. If only she would wash her hair/lose a few pounds/be a better housewife then she would become the literary powerhouse she could be, but isn't. This charming reference to Cooper's own persona is lovely to read. I am not sure why I find it so pleasing; maybe because it is OK to not be OK. The women are not perfect - far from it - yet they are still thriving, creating, sexualising along the way, with a gin in tonic in hand. What I notice is how resourceful they are. There is very little complaining. Jilly Cooper chronicled what she saw and what she was and this certainly generated some of the romantic notions I had about becoming a writer. Oh, to have a dashing copy editor in London who expensed intimate lunches in Soho. And oh, to get given a rolling column in a broadsheet newspaper, the salary for which would help get her back on her feet, maybe after her dastardly husband had run off with a younger (but not so clever) woman. It is a pleasure to see these narrative arcs play out. I am a big fan. And I am, let us not forget, woke AF. It is a strange experience to enjoy something that is so inherently wrong when viewed through a modern lens. But I am here to say our modern lens is occasionally really, really tiresome.

There are other troubling elements like the amount of alcohol that is consumed, the number of children who are neglected, the cast of nannies and babysitters who are left (quite literally) holding the baby whilst the main character slopes off with an adulterous lover. The sheer volume of adultery is remarkable, especially as the novels suggest that it is ethical for people to have affairs, so long as they don't actually leave their spouses. Indiscretions are accepted and forgiven - owing I suppose to the aforementioned 'I must have her' mentality of the male protagonists. The absence of financial security of women is covered in sharp detail; after all, women in the UK could not even get a mortgage until 1976. Living without being 'kept' by a man was unheard of. The language is littered with similes and elaborate extended metaphors, there is every cliché imaginable. It is the kind of writing that simply does not exist these days. Novels now must be completely and uniquely odd; there is rarely any coverage of domesticity. The ordinary-ness of day-to-day relationships is what we all consume on social media, so it is not viewed as interesting enough a topic for a book. Writers must instead conjure up a fictional arena so obscure and a concept so other-worldly that it 'stands out' to a prospective publisher. I am not sure Jilly Cooper would have got a look in with the parochial preoccupations of married life, set in rural England.

There are wonderful descriptions of charming cottages and stately homes. The concentration on dogs and horses makes me want to learn to ride. It is overtly imperfect; life is ramshackle, meals are cobbled together, hair is unwashed, the bedlinen mismatched. What I enjoyed the most is how things lead to things in the Cooper plots. There is a broad and over-arching sense that everyone will be alright in the end and despite significant adversity (bereavement, serious injury, financial ruin, marital breakdown) the characters come out on top. It reads with a hopeful, pull-your-socks-up sensibility that is like a bouyancy aid. Women who are labelled as 'destitute' manage to get paid work through tenuous connections and develop their careers. And whilst the men are rogues, scoundrels, utter cads, they seem to make good, and somehow do the right thing. It strikes me that 'the right thing' is a loose term, given the cultural and societal structure of that time. So many of my generation now reflect on how we were brought up - how the concept of 'parenting' was not even thought of - and we shudder. However, we micromanage our own children and ask them to tell us where they are at any given moment of the day. We grew up with a freedom that furnished us with a tenacity that we now can't locate in our own offspring. It is as we are groping around in the dark, looking for the resilience in them that we naturally possess. I can say with surety that when you read a Jilly Cooper novel it all starts to make more sense. Growing up in the 80's was not for the faint-hearted. In the time it took for my generation to mature, get wed and have careers and children, we traversed an unimaginable landscape of cultural change. And of course the same applied to the generation before us and will apply to the ones coming after.

The power of youth is consistently referred to throughout the novels, where the characters start as young as fifteen to be considered as adult. People in their thirties are described as 'old' and there are virtually no characterisations of women who are not ravishingly young and beautiful. There are presentations of older women which are disparaging; the traditional and bitter mother-in-law. With the exception of Mrs Bodkins, the housekeeper in 'Rivals' who has that soft, A-sexual, round-bellied kindness that used to be automatically associated with women in later life. Perhaps at the time there was little understanding of how women might age and how they might maintain sexual currency after the age of forty-five. Notwithstanding, there are some wild depictions of men having relationships with extremely young women, which I now read as horrendously uncomfortable (downright immoral). But this social commentary does go some way to explain the environment in which my contemporaries and I grew up in. A women's power is shown as being specifically and directly linked to her age and beauty. A man's to his wallet. These binary concepts didn't serve either gender particularly well in the long-run.

Even as the novels progress through the 80's, the role of women morphs and they come across as brittle. Career women whose wardrobes include shoulder pads and leather jackets with popped collars start to emerge. As these characters are emancipated from the kitchen and the bedroom, Cooper depicts them as having lost all of their softness and femininity. They become caricatures and meanwhile the more gentle, less strident women win out in the end. If winning means securing the man, or the house, or the family. It is through these concepts that I can see how I might have been mildly brain-washed as I navigated my late teens and early twenties! There is an unspoken bias towards home-making and nature, the countryside and simple pleasures; be they food, wine or sex. I reflect now on how little my friends and I discussed what married life might actually be like, or how we might manage the domestics whilst we sought out careers (for which we had been educated, along with the boys). There was a blinkered view that it would all work out. I consider this sentiment with a raised eyebrow now, although I see that it was not wrong necessarily, but is linked to the natural and often animalistic urges that Cooper captures so expertly. What has become so incongruous is the disconnect between the rural, domestic idyl and our modern, isolated reality.

My reading of her novels does make me think that writing for the sake of writing is still a worthwhile exercise. The frustrations I have experienced with the publishing industry and my inability to gain access to its inner sanctum are lessened when I read Jilly Cooper. There might still be value in recording life as it is - as I do - and at some point in the future what I write might represent a charming relic of how the world used to be. This gives me hope in the same way that the archetypal Cooper female protagonist keeps going, even to the edge of doom, and still in the end succeeds.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash