Somewhere at the back of a cupboard in my house is the pair of tiny white lace shorts Shirley Conran gave me when I interviewed her in 2012. I’ve never worn them; although she insisted they were just the thing for bed, I worried they would frighten the horses even there. Yet every time I think of throwing them out, I’m unable to do it.
Conran, one of the funniest, sharpest people you could ever meet, bought those shorts to mark the publication of a new edition of Lace, her bestselling bonkbuster of 1982, and because of this I regard them as an important cultural artefact. One day, I may give them, along with my signed copy of Lace, to the Bodleian Library in Oxford: an acquisition that will illustrate to future generations both her lack of pretension, and the way in which women’s writing and reading was still belittled, even at the back end of the 20th century.
Conran, who died last week at the age of 91, had an extraordinary life. Thrown out of home in Portsmouth by her alcoholic father, she went to London, where she became an art student and a model, and married Terence Conran, the founder of Habitat and the father of her sons, Jasper and Sebastian. After seven years, they divorced (he cheated). Finding herself a single parent, she then embarked on a career as a journalist, at one point editing the women’s pages of the Observer, but at 40, having fallen ill with ME, she began writing self-help manuals instead. The first of these was Superwoman (1975), in which she famously instructed her readers that “life is too short to stuff a mushroom”.
She turned to fiction after giving up on a guide to sex for school girls. “The ignorance was so abysmal,” she told me. “I spent 18 months researching it. But then I got so bored I thought I might as well have a go at writing a novel. So Lace is really intensely researched sexual information dressed up as a novel.”
The book, which sold more than 3m copies and made her very rich, is about four friends: women who like clothes, champagne, international travel, money, sex and (above all) work, an activity they regard, as their creator did, as the passport to freedom and independence. At my school, Lace was endlessly passed around, the cracks in the book’s spine sending you straight to the filthy bits – and sex was certainly one reason we loved it.
But I think now that the ambition of its heroines – a hotelier, a PR, a charity fundraiser and a war correspondent – and their solidarity as they clamber to the top were just as important. The book imparts a powerful sense that sisterhood means something; that if women stick together (even women who like Dior and Gucci) anything is possible.
I’m not the only one to feel this. Ask any woman of a certain age and sensibility to tell you their favourite books about friendship – I’ve done this a lot lately, because I’ve been editing an anthology on the subject – and nine times out of 10, they will say Jane Eyre and Lace, putting no paper between the two. The obituary writers can joke all they like about that scene with the sheikh and the goldfish, but the unavoidable truth is that she’s as much of a touchstone for some of us as Charlotte Brontë.
• Rachel Cooke is an Observer columnist
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