Cooper's most famous work, The Exemplary Mother, or Letters between Mrs. Villars and her Family, was published in two volumes in 1769 and republished in a revised second edition in 1784.

[1] Cooper published two novels in 1775 — The Daughter (a heavily revised version of Letters between Emilia and Harriet)[1] and The History of Fanny Meadows — followed by Jane Shore to her Friend: A Poetic Epistle the following year.

[3] Cooper's early work was published anonymously, and even after her success, her books were still attributed to "the author of The Exemplary Mother", though she did begin to sign her introductions.

[3] The practice of keeping ones authorship an open secret enabled women authors to maintain a reputation for modesty and was not unusual during this period.

[6] In his introduction to his mother's Moral Tales, Robert Bransby Cooper wrote, "The entertainment and instruction of her children, [and] a sense of duty ... were [her] principal motives."