Jackie Collins knew that sex and shopping are feminist issues
Few things are more encouraging for an author in the early stages of a writing career than a sharp dismissal from an older, more established colleague. The more brutal the kicking, the more invigorating the sound of a cage being thoroughly rattled. How Jackie Collins must have cheered when Barbara Cartland described
her first novel, The World is Full of Married Men as “nasty, filthy and disgusting”.
Cartland and Collins had more in common than they might have cared to admit. As industrial-scale producers of popular fiction, they descended in a direct line from such prodigiously diligent chroniclers of women’s lives as the formidable Victorian literary powerhouse, Mrs Oliphant, whose oeuvre ran to 120 books.
When Collins began writing in 1968, after an acting career overshadowed by that of her elder sister, Joan, her account of female experience ran distinctly counter to the current of contemporary fiction. The
soixante-huitard tendency in women’s writing was towards painstaking introspection and a degree of gloom. As Collins pithily put it: “Women didn’t write about sex then, they wrote about women going off to the Cotswolds to have a nervous breakdown over a man.”
Though the gleeful materialism of the Eighties spawned the bonkbuster – lengthy celebrations of riotous sex and exuberant shopping by Shirley Conran, Celia Brayfield, Jilly Cooper
et al – it was not until the second decade of the new millennium that the genre pioneered by Collins began to chime with feminist thinking.
From Jane Austen and George Sand to Virginia Woolf, women novelists of the 19th and early 20th centuries understood with excruciating clarity the importance to women’s personal freedom of an independent income. Their novels are entirely pragmatic – if genteelly reticent – about the complicated blurring of boundaries between sex, money and liberation.
Jackie Collins never pretended to be a great writer, although she was a great entertainer. But she understood that those boundaries are still endlessly debated, and the frisson of scandal that reliably propelled her novels onto the bestseller lists has, in retrospect, an unexpected foundation of excellent good sense.
Her iconic heroine Lucky Santangelo, for example, is not merely an accomplished sack artist (to borrow a literary term from Martin Amis) but a keen cook and a wholesome example of healthy appetites in our own tiresome era of diet-obsession. Less than a fortnight before her death from breast cancer, Collins appeared on ITV’s Loose
Women to promote her Lucky Santangelo Cookbook (sample recipe, baked peaches with Cointreau. “Lennie got her drift and lazily smiled: ‘You’d better be making that peach thing you do.’”)
Among Collins’s many admirable qualities was a glittering stoicism. Having spent the summer reading life stories for the Costa biography prize, I have been struck by how many writers see misfortune as a passport to memoir. Collins took a fiercer view of the therapeutic virtues of writing. “Work was my salvation,” she remarked after the sudden death of her second husband. By which she meant not lyrical introspection, but a gallant and admirably profitable return to the venal – but gloriously diverting – world of shopping and shagging.