Stepford Wives (1975)

There’s a revealing article in today’s Daily Mail about Sir Bernard Ashley, co-founder of Laura Ashley, who died this week at 82.  My one and only Laura Ashley purchase was a long green print cotton skirt purchased in London in the late 70’s from a Laura Ashley store near Hampstead Heath, but I never fell in love with her high-necked Victorian style dresses which always seemed a bit to prissy and puritan to me. It all makes sense to me now when I read that Laura Ashley may have been an original Stepford Wife, a doormat for her husband and business partner.

What a sad life for her family…

Daughter Jane has said that there were times when her mother was often stressed ‘to the point of despair’.

When the children David, Jane, Emma and Nick were small they went to bed at 4.30pm in both summer and winter so their mother could get on with her work uninterrupted.

Only when David, the oldest, was able to tell the time did he realise it was not night. But rebellion was not an option, as he jokily observed later, ‘when you had a father like mine’.

read more: The Monster of Chintz (Daily Mail)