If I close my eyes, I can see the jacket photo on the glossy hardcovers in my childhood bedroom: Collins, standing in front of a blandly wealthy backdrop, her hair as rich as chocolate and her shoulders padded past the point of no return.
From the late ’60s—when she published her first book, The World Is Full of Married Men—until her death in 2015, Collins published 32 best-selling novels, characterized by their ballsy female characters, explicit bedroom scenes, and trenchant portrayals of the entertainment industry and its abuses of power.
Collins’s reputation, though, has always suffered from an instinctive tendency among her critics to be alarmed by what she sold: stories about empowered women seeking out gratification on their own terms. I didn’t realize, until I watched the documentarian Laura Fairrie’s Lady Boss: The Jackie Collins Story , quite how precipitously Collins tilted the curve of popular eroticism away from blushing maidens and crinoline toward Alaïa-clad entrepreneurs.
When Collins died in 2015, at the age of 77, she left a mass of documents—photograph albums, diaries, videos—due to the fact that she had been working on an autobiography that she never got to finish.
Her critiques of an industry riven equally with sleaze and aspiration are more incisive than she’s given credit for: Decades before #MeToo, she was a thoughtful chronicler of the scourge of the casting couch, and the challenges that women behind the scenes faced in being taken seriously.
Lucky Santangelo, her most storied character—who Lady Boss theorizes is Collins’s alter ego—overcomes a forced marriage, mob violence, a sexist father, and a litany of abuses to become a casino boss and the head of her own movie studio.
The writer Clive James derides her work as vacant airport trash; the romance novelist Barbara Cartland tells Collins during one shared appearance that she thinks her books are “evil,” to which Collins can only laugh.
For decades, the teenagers and women who read her novels heard over and over that they counted, that their pleasure and autonomy were as important as anyone else’s.