Riders turns 40

And I've written a new prologue, exclusively for Waterstones

As many of my readers well know, Jilly Cooper’s glorious romping tomes were a huge part of my adolescence. Over the last 5 years or so, to my delight and honour, Jilly and I have developed something of a rapport: I read the audio book for Between The Covers; hosted a podcast series about the Disney+ adaptation of Rivals; and now, I’ve written a short prologue, exclusively for Waterstones, to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Riders, the first in the Rutshire Chronicles.

Despite her considerable status, Jilly is the most generous author I’ve ever met. Every time I mention her work—even if it’s just the smallest nod—I receive a miniature letter (literally dolly sized) with a different alliterative address on it (‘peerless pandora’, ‘perfect pandora’), or a pop-up dog postcard (there is only one place that still makes them in the UK, and apparently Jilly puts in bulk orders) and most recently, a sparkly brooch—my first brooch—of a hound chasing a bird (a pheasant, I think?)

they've also re-published the 'girls' books, which are lesser known but my faves; my adorable brooch

I believe that people should be free to choose what they do and don’t read without chastisement… but I genuinely believe that if you haven’t read Jilly Cooper, your life is 5% less golden. (It’s all that honey coloured Cotswold stone.) Anyway, here’s my prologue for the new edition—out now, in Waterstones.

I was 10 when I first read Riders. A little young, you might think, but I was a precocious reader, and the book’s infamous jacket—snowy white jodhpured bottom, a single meaty hand caressing the left buttock—was like a siren call to me. As a Catholic schoolgirl of the ‘90s, Riders was my sex education. (Although pre-Google, it was a few years before I understood all the sexy bits. Whilst my mother was willing to let me raid my older siblings bookshelves, she refused to be my smut dictionary.)

I was instantly hooked—regularly in trouble for bringing her books into my R.E. class (a punchy move, I now concede). When I was 15, Cooper published Pandora. It was as if she knew I was her biggest fan.

A popular Sunday Times columnist, Cooper had been publishing entertaining books about young working women for 15 years before she published Riders, in 1985. Clocking in at over 800 pages, it was the first ‘bonkbuster’ (or what she calls, “my whopping novels”) in The Rutshire Chronicles, a series set in the fictional Cotswolds villages of Rutshire and Larkshire. Our hero is the beautiful, blonde, haughty champion showjumper, Rupert Campbell-Black (a literary heart-throb as renowned as Bronte’s Heathcliff) and his rival (for this book at least), the swarthy, brooding and penniless Jake Lovell. Both men are mad about riding horses—and women—and sometimes the same ones.

Harper’s Bazaar once called Cooper “the Jane Austen of our time” and it’s a neat fit: Riders is parodically ravishing and lavish, but it is also wry, witty and gimlet-eyed. Her world-building (the lists of characters, the village maps, the deference to—and undercutting of—social contracts) is up there with Tolstoy; the emotional drama, almost Shakespearean: when people are heartbroken they are wan and shivering; when they are in love they are flushed and trembling with want. Everyone is rich and foolhardy, and everything is vivid and lush.

The escapism of Riders—“silk-lined” but “pitted with hoof marks”—is enduring, because glamorous wealthy nihilists behaving appallingly plus witty wordplay is always entertaining. (Just look at the success of White Lotus.)

It is a world of Tatler and taffeta; stallions and shagging. There are more dogs than there are people. Cooper is a renowned animal lover—she favours a walking stick with a handle shaped like a badger’s head—and was once the head of the mid-Gloucestershire chapter of The RSPCA before, by her own telling, photographs of her kissing her husband’s best friend, with her dress falling off, were published and she was sacked. “I had absolutely no principles” she said—deliciously, airily—in 2015, admitting that the dishevelled and merrily promiscuous journalist, Janey Lloyd-Foxe (married to Rupert’s almost-as-dashing best friend, Billy) was inspired by her own days of working on Fleet Street.

Riders was an instant best-seller and in the 40 years since it was published, it has sold over 1 million copies in the UK alone. Its publication changed the literary landscape, because it was impossible to nail it to a single genre. It wasn’t literary fiction, but neither did it fit in the poorly-named category of ‘women’s fiction’, either. (Cooper’s high profile fans include Ian Rankin and Rishi Sunak). You could describe it as chick lit for people who hate chick lit.

If you’re under 25 and you’re reading this, Riders is our version of romantasy: lashings of sex in a fictional kingdom far, far away. No-one would say the books are entirely modern—as you would imagine for a book written 40 years ago—but Cooper’s depiction of sex as fun and frisky and healthy should be required reading for Gen Z. Everyone is ravished constantly, no-one struggles to climax and everyone (except the really bad baddies) ends up happy at the end. I can think of no better tonic, for modern times.