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.
