Shirley Conran, who has died aged 91, supplied interviewers with a multi-page CV, but her life could be summarised on a book dust jacket. All that was needed was her surname – from her first husband, the designer Terence Conran – and the quote from her notorious domestic manual, Superwoman (1975): “Life is too short to stuff a mushroom.” And perhaps a line about the crucial erotic role of a goldfish in her 1982 novel, Lace.
Both books were written for much-needed money, and were phenomenons. Superwoman was her response to a request from a recently divorced male publisher for a household manual; Conran understood that “men saw housework as a background to life, and women saw it as their responsibility”, and compiled a guide that came out of the postwar era then just ending, when middle-class wives had been required to be clever and sexy while managing a home with almost no help from paid staff, or husbands.
Lace was the first British success in the then new sex and shopping genre, although Conran meant it also to be a sex education manual for girls, certain to be forbidden and therefore eagerly read behind the bike shed. (When it was republished 30 years later, she reinserted the censored word “masturbation”.) For Conran, the shopping mattered even more than the sex, because “the only thing women are supposed to do with money is spend it, not to make it, talk about it or save it; what counts is money, because it gives you power.” Female rights depended on money, and reliable money on equally paid work. At the least, thought Conran, money “could make unhappiness more endurable”.
Her own life was a long-term experiment in female survival through changing social and sexual expectations and mores. She was born in London, and raised to be a bride for a rich man by her father, W Thirlby Pearce, the owner of a dry-cleaning chain and a drunk who threw the Sunday joint at the wall after the pubs closed, and a determinedly nice mother, Ida (nee Wakelin). Shirley’s education, at St Paul’s girls’ school, a Swiss finishing school and Chelsea Polytechnic (since amalgamated into King’s College London), was preparation for that non-career.
In her Chelsea art student phase, she worked shifts as a waitress in Terence Conran’s local coffee bar, and he ran her home to her digs on his secondhand Vespa scooter. They married in 1955 and drove her mother’s Daimler on honeymoon to Italy, where Terence, who always combined personal life and business, charmed a concession out of a chair factory for his new domestic furnishings enterprise. He had ambitions. She shelved hers.
Their son Sebastian was born later that year, and Jasper in 1959. Shirley was in charge of fabrics for Terence’s firm for six years from 1956, but her real value lay in the development of their family lifestyle, that mix of bistro dinner dishes and casual furniture that Terence began to market through his Habitat stores. He was, she said, “a Victorian”, consistently unfaithful; suspecting this, she gave his secretary a distinctive scented soap as a Christmas present, guessing he would soon smell of it. He did. When challenged, he refused to end the affair, and in 1962 Shirley took the boys and left.
She thus lost her textile job and sought maintenance payments in court; her home downsized to flats whose size and London postal district depended on her overdraft. She had always written (as a child, she produced a newspaper with imaginary divorce case reports), and turned to journalism to fund the gas bill, deploying the Conran name to enter media at the high end.
She became the first women’s editor of the Observer magazine in 1964, and, never short of an idea, as women’s editor of the Daily Mail created the Femail section in 1969 for women as “wife, mother, mistress, chauffeur, cook, washer-up, accountant, general dogsbody and, sometimes, wage-earner”. Journalism taught her the skill of research, and discipline: “The perfect training for life is one year with a difficult editor.”
It was an insecure living, though, prone to impromptu firings: at a low, Conran wrote catalogue captions to feed the family. In 1970, she fell ill with what was later diagnosed as ME (chronic fatigue syndrome), which weakened her, leaving her without income or savings. When Superwoman was commissioned, Conran failed to find any volumes on proper domestic management in Foyles bookshop, so “I then lay down and wrote Superwoman”, which advised on such chores as how to clean a silver sauceboat and keep up maximum middle-class appearances with minimum effort. A younger generation of working women, and those without any background inheritance of sauceboats, laughed at the book, or were hostile, but it ran to seven editions in six months.
Conran relished even the bad publicity (“they can say you are a woman of genius in two lines, but a long attack is better”) and worked at selling it, touring outlets in a camper van, ever smiling, thickening an already impervious epidermis. She had always behaved like a celebrity; her voice had the growl of 1950s theatre, and she lived dramatically, descending the Grand Canyon in an evening dress after a Greyhound bus lost her luggage, or spending her last £200 on a secondhand fox-fur coat. She never earned much from Superwoman or its sequels and spin-offs. After that experience, she read contracts to the last clause.
Her financial life was upgraded when the novelist Anthony Burgess recommended in 1979 she exchange a London basement flat for a cheap studio in Monte Carlo. There, she researched female sexuality for 18 months, found out what sold in fiction, and disciplined herself to sit for seven days a week planning, then writing longhand in red ink on yellow legal paper, 400,000 words, later edited to 250,000-word blockbuster length. Burgess showed the manuscript to the head of the Princess Grace public library, who recognised a bestseller.
Conran banked the considerable proceeds of Lace, followed by those of Lace 2 (1985), Savages (1987), Crimson (1992) and Tiger Eyes (1994), as well as television miniseries rights, buying a £5 makeup bag to celebrate her first million. Then, she said, she “fell into the trap of the nouveau riche”, acquiring apartments in Monte Carlo and New York, a chateau, and jewellery, including a tiara, all of which she sold at the age of 61, retaining only a few essential diamonds, and proposing thereafter to hire any luxuries she fancied.
This renunciatory gesture, like her launch of a perfume, acknowledgment of a facelift (“Only in England do people feel that cosmetic surgery should be reserved for Spitfire pilots”), sudden lesbian recollections, vilification of Terence after decades of reticence, and posing topless at 62 in OK! magazine, tended to coincide with a new publication. An insider’s slowly accrued knowledge of publicity remained her most bankable asset.
After a final novel, The Revenge of Mimi Quinn (1998), Conran retired, having returned from gilded exile to a mansion flat in Putney, south-west London, its kitchen designed to look like a nightclub: “I don’t cook any more, no one in their right mind does,” she said, ever in advance of everybody else’s lifestyle aspirations. The hell with all prep work, not just the stuffing of mushrooms; she now had a cook, and her own secretaries.
Conran created charities that came out of the hard core of her life: in 2001 the Work-Life Balance Trust, advising the government on the subject, and in 2009 Maths Action, for economic education, though she believed women’s finances would not improve in her lifetime. In 2004 she was made OBE for services to equality, and in 2023 a dame for her services to mathematics education as founder of the Maths Anxiety Trust.
Two further marriages, to John Stephenson, sales director of the Conran group, and Kevin O’Sullivan, also a sales director, were brief. “A woman has to be her own Prince Charming,” she said.
Sebastian and Jasper survive her.
• Shirley Ida Conran, journalist and novelist, born 21 September 1932; died 9 May 2024
