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EDEN CONFIDENTIAL: Lace and Superwoman author Shirley Conran leaves half her fortune to designer Jasper Conran, the fashion designer she was estranged from for a decade
A year after her death aged 91 - just after a damehood had been conferred on her in hospital - Shirley Conran's will shows she left half her fortune to her son, designer Jasper Conran.
But Shirley Conran, revered at the Daily Mail for establishing 'Femail', also said that she spent the next 20 years giving away much of that fortune, often to benefit women's causes or in specific acts of philanthropy, like paying for a new Collection of Modern Art at her alma mater, St Paul's Girls' School. Dame Shirley left £2.5million, a fraction of the riches that snowballed after she received a £1million advance for Lace, just seven years after the publication of Superwoman, in which she'd warned that 'life is too short to stuff a mushroom'. The Earl and Countess of Derby's only daughter, Lady Henrietta Stanley, 28, is engaged to Alexander 'Sasha' Reviakin, 28, a descendant of newspaper magnate William Berry, the 1st Viscount Camrose
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