Conran, the ‘queen of the bonkbuster novel’, dies aged 91
Shirley Conran, the author of Lace and Superwoman, has died aged 91, her son Jasper Conran, the designer, has confirmed.
Known as the “queen of the bonkbuster”, the bestselling author founded the Maths Anxiety Trust, a not-for-profit organisation that helps people who experience anxiety or fear when faced with maths problems. Last week Conran was awarded a damehood from her bed in Charing Cross hospital in London for her services to mathematics education.
Jasper Conran announced his mother’s death on Instagram. “Shirl girl has flown away, a lark ascending”, he wrote. “Thank you to all the wonderful doctors and nurses and thank you to all of you kind, dear people who sent her so many beautiful messages that meant so much to her.”
Born in London, Conran attended a finishing school in Switzerland before training as a sculptor and painter and working in textile design for several years. In 1968 she joined the Daily Mail, initially as a design consultant. She became women’s editor and launched Femail, the newspaper’s first dedicated women’s section.
Conran became the women’s editor of the Observer and was a columnist on Vanity Fair. After being diagnosed with myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) in her late 30s, she could no longer work full-time, and started writing books.
By 1983, Conran had written her first bestseller, Superwoman, a housework manual in which she told women life is too short to stuff a mushroom, its follow-up Forever Superwoman, about having young children, and Futures, a guide to the menopause. Her plan was to write a guide to sex for schoolgirls, but while researching it she “got so bored I thought I might as well have a go at writing a novel”, she told Rachel Cooke in a 2012 Observer interview.
Lace, her global hit debut novel about four friends who meet a film star in a Manhattan hotel, is “really intensely researched sexual information dressed up as a novel”, she said.
Lace has sold more than 3m copies in 35 countries. In 1984, it was adapted into a TV miniseries in the US starring Bess Armstrong, Brooke Adams and Arielle Dombasle. “Lace is exuberantly, fabulously over-the-top”, wrote Sarah Hughes on the novel’s 30th anniversary in 2012. “Its heroines suffer no fools, take no prisoners and leave few bonkbuster cliches unused.”
Conran, whose other novels include Savages, The Revenge, Crimson and Tiger Eyes, was also an active campaigner. In 1998 she founded Mothers In Management in an effort to improve working conditions and flexibility for working mothers. In 2001 she founded the Work-Life Balance Trust, a charity that lobbied for flexible working, and in 2004 she was awarded an OBE for services to equal opportunities.
That year Conran started campaigning about maths. She believed that a better understanding of numbers would help women find the same level of financial success as men.
“Never mind ‘life’s too short to stuff a mushroom’,” she wrote. “These days I say: ‘Life’s too short to be short of money.’”