Do Jilly Cooper's books have anything to offer millennial women?

I had never heard of Jilly Cooper until a few weeks ago. The veteran novelist's bonkbuster "Ruthshire Chronicles" series, first published in the 1980s, passed me by while I was still a twinkle in my father's eye.

When my editor gave me this brief – to cast a millennial's eye over Cooper's books – I thought, okay, I got this. Her stuff is kind of like 50 Shades of Grey for old people, right?

Wrong. I flicked through the pages expecting steamy sex scenes to jump off the page, but none were obvious.

When I first sat down to read 50 Shades, I was fairly repulsed by the variety of ways EL James would describe body parts and sex acts.

His length; my sex; a "Christian Grey popsicle" . . . good God. I cringe just at the thought of it and how awful it was. After about seven pages I had to put that book down, unable to detach the grossly graphic detail from the really disturbing plot lurking underneath all of the filth.

How could this be erotic? This was a man who was abused as a child turning a woman into an object of his desire; controlling everything from her movements, dress, fitness levels and body hair to when, where and how she had sex.

Oh and the whole whipping, smacking, sex dungeon thing. I thought that was also weird.

Given my detest for 50 Shades, which was the only real context I had when I began Jilly Cooper's books, I wasn't exactly relishing the thought of reading her first novel (Riders) and her latest (Mount!) for this article. But I would be proven wrong.

To your average middle-class Irish woman, Cooper's world is unfamiliar, to say the least. The upper-class British setting of the Cotswolds showjumping circuit is thick with Eton schoolboys, champagne-sipping housewives in "jolly expensive" luncheon dresses, and riders in tweed suits whose bedrooms are littered with copies of Horse and Hound.

Character names are fantastically farcical – Dudly Diplock, Molly Maxwell, Christopher Crossley – as are the pet names they use to describe one another – chum, darling, frump.

Although this is a world we cannot really relate to, the language makes it quite clear that Cooper is also poking fun and rolling her eyes at their antics.

When I first leafed through Riders, I was surprised at the lack of, well, riding. (And I don't mean the equine kind). Unlike 50 Shades, everything is much more subtle and tongue in cheek. Cooper makes great use of the endless euphemisms between riding horses and having sex. Girth, rump, buck, nuzzle – the book is rife with them.

What really surprised me about her writing was how it held my attention and didn’t repulse me with pages upon pages of graphic detail and sex-toy-wielding psychopaths.

This is kind of like Keeping Up Appearances, if you can imagine Hyacinth back in the day searching for her Mr Right and having lots of fun doing so. In comparison, 50 Shades of Grey is like watching the internet's worst hardcore porn.

The question, though, is what does Cooper have to offer the modern woman? We are not used to sex being hidden in the subterfuge of suggestive language and horse-riding euphemisms. We live in a world where it leaps off the page in all its graphic glory, where pornography of every variety imaginable is readily available, and where most TV dramas and films contain some form of sex scene.

Okay, Cooper’s novels are not the kind of high-brow literature you’ll be bragging about to make you sound smarter than you are. But they are good craic, and they don’t take themselves too seriously.

It also doesn’t leave you with a veil of sweat over your brow, worrying just how is it cool now to fantasise about men with psychological issues tying you to a bed and hitting you with instruments?

It provides rich philandering husbands, widows who like a young man in tight jodpurs, and pudgy teenagers who eat through their feelings of unrequited love. It provides characters who knock a bit of fun out of flirting and all that leads to while also not leaving it completely up to our imagination.

What I like about Cooper’s books are that they provide an at least somewhat realistic representation of sex, which has become so twisted and distorted in today’s world of porn, toys and elaborate novels.

So is Jilly Cooper too vanilla for the millennial woman?

I would say she offers something refreshing in a genre that can often depict quite disturbing and damaging visions of sex. She provides a conventional depiction of casual sex for a generation who are surrounded with violent pornography and graphic detail.

This is not 50 Shades of Grey for old people, but ramped-up chicklit with a side of humour.

While they are certainly not ground-breaking for today’s youth, Cooper’s books do provide a world that is without the excessive demands of our modern expectations of sex.

And that is a relief.