Nigella Lawson was, like her brother, a quality journalist and an Oxford graduate. She was a writer by trade and a good one. She made the natural progression from critic to book reviewer to restaurant critic, and then branched out into cookery-writing. (But to this day the title Domestic Goddess makes me cringe).
Her career was therefore a natural progression and she also hooked onto a zeitgeist of the late 90s/early noughties: an aesthetics of comfortable, cosy domesticity, cottagecore, Rick Stein and River Cottage on the TV and lots of typically English programmes about making our homes our castles. This time was - up until 2001 at least - one of comfortable affluence, cosy predictablility, and minimal political upheaval.
Those times are gone. The credit bubble has long since burst, we've lived through a steady period of economic deflation and global unrest, the cost of living has hugely elevated without a proportional increase in income, and individual/identity politics have become increasingly divisive and eclipse the interests of the collective. The way in which we consume our media is also rapidly changing. Internet chat rooms imploded as they became more and more toxic and no provider would risk continuing to run them, then Facebook, Friends Reunited and MySpace died a death along with blogging and travel writing.
Nigella had privileged political and social connections, was media savvy, and was in the right place at the right time to capitalise on a particular social mood. These windows of opportunity tend not to last long, particularly given the unprecedented rate of change in the way people consume material.
Sadly, what's 'selling' to the public at present is a whole load of SM influencing structured around the image of the trad wife, a raft of fantastical conspiracy theories, and a great deal of male rights activism. We are, in short, leaning much more prominently to the right. That's worrying.
But where on earth this leaves someone who wants to sell SM content of a gentler and less politicised variety is less certain.