NOVELIST and journalist Dame Shirley Conran famous for writing the book Superwoman has died aged 91.
Dame Shirley had received a damehood in her hospital bed only last week for her services to mathematics education, having founded the Maths Anxiety Trust.
Her son, the designer Jasper Conran, wrote on Instagram on Thursday: “Shirl girl has flown away, a lark ascending.
“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 1932, Dame Shirley started out working in textile design before moving into journalism.
She became a design consultant for the Daily Mail newspaper and then home editor, before taking over as women’s editor and launching the Femail section.
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Dame Shirley would later become women’s editor for the launch of the Observer magazine and a columnist for Vanity Fair magazine.
But its for her books she is most well know – for which she was labelled the “Queen of the Bonkbuster”.
In 1975, she wrote acclaimed non-fiction book Superwoman, recognised as a feminist practical guidebook.
Her first novel titled Lace was published in 1982 and later turned into a TV miniseries in the US starring Bess Armstrong, Brooke Adams and Arielle Dombasle.
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Dame Shirley began writing books after she was diagnosed with myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) in her late 30s and could no longer work full-time.
Her other novels include Savages, Crimson and Tiger Eyes.
She was married to British designer, restaurateur, and writer Terence Conran between 1955 and 1962.
Aside from writing, Dame Shirley had a long history of workplace campaigning, which began in 1998 when she founded Mothers In Management which aimed to improve working conditions and flexible practices for working mothers.
In 2001 she founded The Work-Life Balance Trust, a charity which lobbied for flexi-hours for men and women, and she was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2004 for services to equal opportunities.
It was also in 2004 that Dame Shirley began pushing for better educational resources, after she failed to find a good maths textbook for her goddaughter and decided to write her own course.
In 2009 she founded Maths Action, an organisation with the aim of improving numerical performance in Britain – and five years later she published Money Stuff, a maths course that follows the GCSE syllabus.
In 2018 Dame Shirley founded the Maths Anxiety Trust to “raise public awareness and understanding of the condition known as maths anxiety and to find solutions”.
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She said she funded her education campaign work in the UK from her book royalties and for her efforts she was made a dame in the 2023 resignations honours list of former prime minister Liz Truss.
Sir Terence died in October 2020.
