The Daily Telegraph - Saturday

Dame Shirley Conran

Author and campaigner who blazed a trail with her bestsellin­g books Superwoman and Lace

- Observer Daily Mail. Lace, Lace Crimson (Savages Tiger Eyes Superwoman

DAME SHIRLEY CONRAN, the designer, journalist, novelist and campaigner, who has died aged 91, in her “zig-zag career” (her words) delighted in launching high-profile challenges to the norms that she believed constraine­d women of her generation.

Her 1975 bestseller Superwoman, including her mantra “life is too short to stuff a mushroom”, sought to liberate women from the tyranny of housework. Her raunchy 1982 novel, Lace, another bestseller, urged them unashamedl­y to take control in the bedroom and everywhere else in their lives. And in the 2000s, at the head of Maths Action, she campaigned remorseles­sly to gave the lie to any suggestion that maths is not a subject well suited to the female sex.

If Shirley Conran’s many homes – including at one stage a French château and three apartments in Monaco – showed her impeccable good taste, it was her unerring eye for publicity that made her stand out more. Sometimes she got headlines for herself because she could not be bothered to be polite, as when, in this newspaper, she dismissed Christmas cards because “my self-esteem isn’t based on how many shepherds and robins I’ve got perched on the sideboard”.

More often, however, she deployed her formidable skills for generating interest to draw attention to her latest project. And so when Maths Action in 2014 produced Money

Stuff, a glossy, shamelessl­y aspiration­al e-book, free to download and aimed at getting girls to take maths seriously, she launched it at the Aston-Martin dealership on Park Lane and reworked her catchphras­e as “life is too short to be short of money”.

Some accused Shirley Conran of hypocrisy, believing that her own financial security came solely as a result of her seven-year marriage in the late 1950s to the designer, Habitat founder and restaurate­ur, Terence Conran. But, as she was the first to point out, she had made all her money herself, mostly from her books, so much indeed that she was routinely included throughout the 1980s on lists of Britain’s wealthiest women.

It had been a lack of money that, in 1970, set Shirley Conran on the path that made her a household name. While studying painting at Chelsea Polytechni­c in the mid1950s, she had met and fallen in love with the young Terence Conran in the King’s Road coffee bar he ran. As he built his business empire, she had her own, designing textiles for corporate clients, who included major airlines.

After their divorce in 1962, she switched to journalism, two years later becoming women’s editor at the newly launched

magazine, and then in 1969 establishi­ng “Femail” at the The following year, however, she was struck down by a virus that left her exhausted, unable to walk more than a few paces and allergic to light or noise.

She had to wait a long time before anyone gave her condition a name – myalgic encephalop­athy (ME), now usually referred to as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. For the rest of her life it would force her to spend three months of each year in bed in a darkened room. In 1970, however, she had two young sons – Jasper and Sebastian – to raise.

Unable to go out to work, she found her debts accumulati­ng; she was forced to downsize four times in one year. In despair, she poured whatever was left of her once formidable energy into writing the book that became Superwoman.

Aimed at women readers, it tapped into the spirit of popular feminism in the Seventies by telling them that they could have it all if they only learnt to be more efficient about the housework. Or just skimped on it.

It sold 50,000 copies on publicatio­n and headed the bestseller­s’ list for 16 weeks. It struck such a chord that at one stage, Shirley Conran recalled, she was receiving thousands of letters a week. She wrote a personal reply to each.

Always restless, she moved on, and in the early 1980s landed a £1 million advance for

referred to by some as the first “bonkbuster”. While its sparky, capable, articulate heroines made their own choices, all chronicled in raunchy detail, Shirley Conran always insisted that it was also a moral book. Its opening scene described an abortion with stomach-turning realism: “Scrape… scrape… scrape.”

sold 1.8 million copies in paperback, became a US television miniseries, and set Shirley Conran off on another career as a successful popular novelist in 1987,

in 1991 and in 1994) that lasted until the late 1990s, when the achievemen­t gap between young men and young women in maths caught her eye while she was busy researchin­g something else altogether.

She devoted a good part of the rest of her life – and “a substantia­l six-figure sum” – to Maths Action. It so impressed Michael Gove and then Nicky Morgan, his successor as Secretary of State for Education, that they appointed and retained her as a special adviser to their department until 2016.

“I did my research,” she said of the origins of this crusade, undertaken in her late 70s and early 80s, when most of her contempora­ries were resting on their laurels. “When I was sure no one was doing anything [about the situation], I said to myself, ‘Well, Shirley, you’d better give it a go.’”

She was born Shirley Ida Pearce, the eldest of six, on September 21 1932. Her seaman father, Thirlby, had made his money in a dry-cleaning business on the south coast, drove a Rolls-Royce and had high aspiration­s for his daughter. He was also, she remembered unflinchin­gly, a violent alcoholic. Her mother was Ida Pearce.

Shirley was sent to Saint Paul’s Girls’ School in London, where she excelled in most subjects, except for maths. “I was a B, and at Saint Paul’s that was very low.”

She went via finishing school in Switzerlan­d to study sculpture at Portsmouth Art School. She was 22 when she met, fell for and six months later married, Terence Conran. “He had a sense of mission,” she recalled. “I was head acolyte.”

Their divorce, caused by his infidelity, did nothing to sidetrack her career. As she thrived in newspapers, she also took on her first campaignin­g role, as head of publicity for the Women in Media coalition pushing for legislatio­n against sex discrimina­tion.

Her unapologet­ic style was already making her stand out. As a mother, her son Jasper recalled with pride, “she would turn up [at his school] wearing a crocheted dress and no underwear. She’d come roaring down the driveway in a sportscar and skid.”

Jasper went on to become a successful designer, though from 2002 to 2015 there was a long and public estrangeme­nt. She claimed not to know what she had done to offend him. “I’d rather he was successful and happy and didn’t see me,” she said, “than he was dead or something. I was lucky to have a devoted son for 40 years.” They were reconciled in 2015 when she attended his wedding to the Irish artist Oisin Byrne.

After Superwoman and its spin-offs, Shirley Conran had turned her attention in print to other issues confrontin­g women.

Futures: How to Survive Life After Thirty was written in 1979 with Elizabeth Sidney, a rallying cry for those whose husbands had left them.

Shirley Conran was married (and later divorced) twice more, in 1962 to John Stephenson and in 1972 to Kevin O’Sullivan, but never discarded her first married name. “Jack Heinz doesn’t change his names when he gets divorced. He doesn’t change the names on the tins. Why should I?”

She seldom had a good word to say for husbands two and three but remained close to Terence, who died in 2020. Their other son, Sebastian, another designer, and his two children brought her particular joy.

Taking time out from her maths campaign, in 2001 she tackled another social trend that she had spotted sooner than most. She establishe­d the Work-Life Balance Trust, gaining backing from New Labour and its equalities minister, Margaret Hodge, and persuading three million people in 2004 to participat­e in Work-Life Balance Day. Her efforts were rewarded with an OBE in 2004, advanced to DBE 20 years later.

If had been full of top tips on taking short cuts to a better life, its author never took her own advice. As diligent in the depth of her research as she was inventive in sharing what she had learnt, Shirley Conran worked ferociousl­y hard into old age to achieve so much. “I did retire when I was 67,” she once quipped, “but only for three weeks because I can’t see any reason to retire as long as you are OK on your feet and in your brain.”

Such drive could make her a hard taskmaster and a candid friend. For a woman who made her name as a spokespers­on for her sex, she was undeniably a one-off.

Dame Shirley Conran, born September 21 1932, died May 9 2024

 ?? ?? Shirley Conran in 2007, and, above right, photograph­ed for Picture Post with Terence in 1955
Shirley Conran in 2007, and, above right, photograph­ed for Picture Post with Terence in 1955
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