Shirley Conran Books in Order

If you want her signature glamorous saga: Lace → Lace II
If you want survival suspense: Savages
If you want family fortune drama: Crimson
If you want art-world intrigue: Tiger Eyes
If you want practical vintage nonfiction: Superwoman → Forever Superwoman → Down with Superwoman

Shirley Conran was born in Hendon, Middlesex, on September 21, 1932, and grew up in London as the eldest of six children. Her father ran a dry-cleaning business, and by her own account home could be an uneasy place. She went to St Paul's Girls' School, spent time at a Swiss finishing school, and later studied art in Portsmouth and at Chelsea Polytechnic. All of that would feed the way she wrote about money, class, taste, and female survival.

She did not begin as a novelist.

In the 1950s she married the designer Terence Conran, worked with him in fabrics and design, and had two sons, Sebastian and Jasper. After the marriage ended, she had to support herself and her children, and she moved through publicity and design jobs into journalism. She worked at the Daily Mail and the Observer, and at the Mail she launched Femail, a women's section that widened what could be covered in a newspaper.

A serious illness changed the direction of her career. After viral pneumonia, she was left with what was later identified as ME, or chronic fatigue syndrome, and ordinary tasks became much harder. She started jotting down shortcuts for getting through the day, and those notes grew into Superwoman in 1975, the practical household guide that made her famous and sold in huge numbers.

That book hit a nerve.

Readers found something freeing in its refusal to treat domestic perfection as a moral duty. Conran stayed in that practical lane for a while with books like Superwoman 2, Forever Superwoman, which focused on life with young children, Futures: How to Survive Life After Thirty / Futurewoman, and later Down with Superwoman. Even when she was giving advice, her real subjects were time, money, exhaustion, and how women keep some control over their own lives.

Then she turned to fiction, and Lace changed everything. Published in 1982, it spent 13 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and became a successful US miniseries. Readers came for the glamorous setup and the giant secret at its center, but many stayed for the women themselves: clever, messy, ambitious, angry, funny, and always trying to make room for themselves in a world built by men.

Her later novels kept that interest in women under pressure, but changed the setting each time. Savages throws a group of wealthy wives into a brutal survival story after a coup. Crimson turns inheritance, family loyalty, and a dying grandmother into a long power struggle. Tiger Eyes follows a young painter into the world of forged art, while The Revenge of Mimi Quinn stretches across decades of performance, ambition, betrayal, and feud. The plots are big, but the question under them is often simple: how does a woman stay free when love, family, sex, money, and reputation are all in play?

She never lost interest in work outside the book world. In later life she put a lot of energy into campaigning around work-life balance and maths education, founding Maths Action and later the Maths Anxiety Trust because she believed girls and women were too often shut out of financial confidence by fear of numbers. She also spent years living between London, France, and Monaco.

Conran was made a dame for her work in maths education shortly before her death. She died in London on May 9, 2024, aged 91.

What lasts is her plain, tough-minded view of women's lives. Whether she was writing about a sink full of dishes or a hotel full of secrets, she kept coming back to the same point: women need options, and options usually start with money, time, and the right to stop pretending.