What do the names Octavia, Prudence, Harriet, and Imogen all have in common? If you don’t know the answer to that, you’re probably – unlike our current prime minister – not a fan of Jilly Cooper.

Cooper has just published her latest bonkbuster Tackle, one of the doorstep-sized Rutshire Chronicles series that also includes Riders and Rivals. These books are set in a fictionalised Cotswolds and are as reliably comforting as a tin of Quality Streets. But in the good old, bad old days of the seventies and early eighties many of us came to this writer through her ‘name-books’ – six romantic novels (and one collection of short stories) which always had a young woman’s Christian name as the title.

I’ve drawn immoderate pleasure and comfort from Cooper’s name books over the years

Were it not for my older sister, it’s doubtful I would have come across them at all. They seemed designed for hormonal schoolgirls and frisky, daydreaming secretaries. Caught with them at boarding school aged ten, I got glowering looks from the teachers – ‘Not suitable reading matter!’ – and quickly learnt to stash them under my mattress and read them at night with a torch.

While my fellow pupils lived in a world of the football game Subbuteo, Wisden and Willard Price stories, I was already dreaming of metropolitan romance, cosy wine bars in Sloane Square and one day owning a Westminster flat in ‘harmonising greys and rusts, with abstract paintings… thousands of books, and the sort of vastly elaborate hi-fi system you need a licence to drive’ – like the barrister Pendle, one of the characters in Prudence.

The format is as predictable as a Bond film. An amiably flawed young woman – we’ll call her Felicity – working in something like advertising, sales or a public library, meets, by chance, an homme fatale. He leads her on a merry dance through Belgravia, Mayfair and the fashionable regions of London’s Zone 1 (Muswell Hill, when mentioned, feels as far away as a Bangladeshi slum). In the books, this initial man is always problematic: he’s too volatile, elusive and not to be trusted. But Felicity, bless her, ‘faint with lust’, is hooked.

Then, a few chapters into the book, this initial man invites Felicity off somewhere and she enters, in true Shakespearean fashion, a ‘magic forest’. This may be a crumbling pile in the Lake District, a Cote d’Azur hotel or even a narrowboat on Britain’s waterways. It’s an enclosed world – a kind of Big Brother petri dish for the upper-middle classes – where for days or weeks Felicity will be trapped with half a dozen witty, sexually unbuttoned malcontents and get some concentrated experience of life. Alcohol and cigarettes (better if they’re French) are never far away (it’s the seventies), and there are riotous parties where the sniping, scintillating comments fly back and forth like lacrosse balls. It’s here that Felicity usually meets man number two – the real deal alpha who smoulders onto the page, showing up initial man as a flimsy imposter.

Jilly Cooper’s ‘real deal alphas’ (RDA) are all of a type. They are tall and broad-shouldered, have long powerful legs, forbidding moods and guarded but tender hearts. Their minds are on higher things like their glittering careers (foreign correspondent/mogul/novelist) and, barring the odd black coffee or triple brandy (a sign of the ubermensch in Cooper), they care as little for their diet as their hairstyle.

Their relationships with Felicity tend to start badly: she has fripperies they disapprove of and she loathes them right back, dismissing them as bullies. They say things like ‘Get in the car!’ or ‘You’ve had quite enough!’ or ‘Cut it out! You’re behaving like a child!’ But soon comes a moment of crisis for Felicity (she shivers, weeps and vomits) and our beetle-browed hero unexpectedly shows chops as a father figure. One RDA, in Octavia, even gives the title figure a spanking for loose morals. But he’s good enough to have broad hairy forearms and tuck in her blankets afterwards, so she delivers him her heart.

Nobody reads Jilly Cooper’s name books just once – Tanya Gold once wrote ‘they are like houses I have lived in’; I know these heroes better than many of my friends. My personal favourite is probably Matt O’Connor in Imogen, a shaggy Irish journalist whose bashed out articles light up the Sunday supplements. Matt’s a mover and shaker in the adult world – we know this because he speaks French, wins at gambling and has, we hear, ‘beaucoup d’allure’. Each day he guts the newspapers over Pernod, even Figaro and Paris Match, and says big-cocked, damn-your-eyes things like ‘this business in Peru’s going to explode at any moment. They want me to fly out tomorrow.’

Nobody in life has ever seemed more adult to me than Matt O’Connor. In many ways at 53 I am still waiting to become him. I have a feeling, though, he didn’t grow up reading books like this.

Though we know Felicity will end up with our man, there are plenty of obstacles, not least his apparent indifference to her (revealed at the 11th hour, rather optimistically, to be mere self-protective bluffing all along). A love rival too pops up to complicate things, usually an actress or supermodel, skilled at the savage put-down and willing to do anything to see off a competitor. Prudence has a peach of a villainess in character Berenice de Courcy: an American feminist, immaculately dressed with gleaming black hair and a wardrobe by Hermès. Berenice talks about herself incessantly, speaks in psychobabble, dislikes shabby English houses, rigidly controls her boyfriend’s diet and dreams of one day assuming power and sacking the housekeeper. Royal family watchers would be forgiven any perceived similarities: the novel was written in 1978, several years before Meghan Markle was born.

These books have left their mark on me, I realise that. Where do my assumptions come from, that red wine is the ultimate comfort drink or French food the snazziest? That tax inspectors and American academics are ghastly, or that a real man doesn’t care what he looks like? Perhaps from experience, but from Jilly Cooper’s books as well.

Do young people still read them in 2023? Should they? Were those teachers right after all? I’ve drawn immoderate pleasure and comfort from Cooper’s name books over the years, though one of the disappointments of growing up is discovering what would be blindingly obvious to any adult: they’re about as true to life as Chicken Run.

That high-ceilinged and autumnal Zone 1 flat never materialises, nor does the womblike little wine bar to shield you from all ills. Most of life, you find, is spent twiddling your thumbs in Zones 3 or 4 (in all senses) and in the field of romance the 11th hour feels too much like the tenth. As for that ‘magic forest’, even if you briefly find it, the denizens keep their secrets and, unless you’re drunk, rarely zing and sparkle as you hope. But that’s what her novels are: fairytales you never quite grow out of.

Maybe Cooper’s beloved Cotswold villages – where Liz Hurley, Kate Moss and Jeremy Clarkson lay their heads – are whooping it up 24-7. But for most of us, the only place we can find Jilly Cooper’s warm, enfolding world is where we always did: between the covers of her books.