Laura Ashley a Life By Design

by Anne Sebba, Sir Bernard Ashley (Foreword)

Laura Ashley : A Life by Design

207 pages, Hardcover

First published May 25, 1990

About the author

Anne Sebba began her writing career at the BBC world service, Arabic section, while still a student. After graduating from King’s College, London in Modern European History, she worked as a foreign correspondent for Reuters in London and Rome, the first woman Reuters accepted on their Graduate Trainee Scheme. In 1975 she moved to New York with her husband and first baby returning two years later with a second baby and first book. From then on she was launched into a freelance career as a journalist, biographer, cruise lecturer and occasional broadcaster and is now also an officially accredited Nadfas lecturer. She has worked for many writers’ organisations including PEN Writers in Prison Committee and the Society of Authors chairing its Management Committee from 2013- 2015 and followed her bestselling biography That Woman, a life of Wallis Simpson, based on the discovery of 15 secret letters which Wallis wrote to her second husband Ernest Simpson, with Les Parisiennes : How the Women of Paris lived, loved and died in the 1940s published in the UK and US in 2016.

Reviews

[Sue Heaser · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this very much. The author did an excellent job of telling the story of Laura and Bernard Ashley and the amazing rise of the company. I just felt that she was perhaps a little too polite about Bernard’s rather irascible behaviour! I also feel that a book about a design company should really have had more photos and illustrations of the clothing and designs, not just b/w photos of people. But these are small criticisms and overall it is an enthralling telling of a remarkable story and an enormous amount of work and research has gone into it.

[Marilyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

I saw a blog about this book and ordered it through an Interlibrary loan since I always loved the Laura Ashley style. I remember the store right next to the Four Seasons in Seattle. I was interested in the woman who began the business that went from a cottage industry to a major international brand. I found the story enjoyable, but the prose tedious to read. I think the author must have mentioned every employee in the industry as she wove the story of Laura and her husband, Bernard, through the years that they raised a family of four, grew an industry, and did a kind of marital dance where Laura (the creative director) and Bernard (the businessman) had a traditional marriage while engaging in a tug of war as to who really ran the business.

But, the author did a nice job of giving the reader a sense of the person Laura Ashley was -- strong and opinionated, creative and talented, intelligent and caring while playing the "good wife" and letting her husband take credit for much of what she directed behind the scenes. Born in Wales, she was an incredibly amazing woman whose sense of style and community built a whole industry which began in 1953 with a first attempt at silkscreening fabric and continues today as an international company.