Jocasta Innes - Telegraph Lithe and bohemian, with a taste for brightly coloured clothes offset by bangles and beads, Jocasta Innes claimed to have made and tried everything she described in her books. Yet she had not always been a domestic goddess. "I was a slut until I had a first baby," she once admitted. Before that I was a kind of party girl. Jocasta Innes was born on May 21 1934 in Nanking, China, where her father was an executive with Shell Oil. She described her mother, who came from a once-wealthy Irish-Argentine family, as "an action woman" who would do almost anything rather than housework. As a result Jocasta grew up, by her own account, in blissful ignorance of the domestic arts. As her father moved with his job, Jocasta and her three siblings were shuttled from Asia to Australia, to Africa and America. In 1949 she was sent to board at Bedford High School, from where she won an exhibition to Girton College, Cambridge, to read Modern Languages. Though she had a somewhat meagre allowance of £5 a week, it hardly mattered as there was no shortage of admirers offering to take her out. Mark Boxer, the cartoonist, would rave about her as one of the Cambridge beauties of his undergraduate days. After graduation Jocasta landed a job as a journalist on the Evening Standard's Londoner's Diary and soon married Richard Goodwin, the film director, with whom she had a daughter, the television producer and writer Daisy Goodwin. She also had a son by the New Age writer John Michell, whom her husband adopted and who, as Jason Goodwin, became a writer and historian. In a troubling memoir of her childhood, Daisy Goodwin revealed her mother as being a very different woman from that implied by her books. When Daisy was five her mother left her father for Joe Potts, a struggling Newcastle novelist six years her junior, whom she later married: "Always a trend-spotter, my mother had found a man who summed up the late Sixties: young, working-class, dirty, rude and sexy. She found him irresistible and promptly left her marriage and two small children - I was five and my brother three - to live with him in a bedsit in Dorset. Richard Goodwin was given custody of the children and later remarried. Daisy recalled how her mother "used to laugh when I turned up at her house wearing the frumpy kilt and tan Clarks sandals that my stepmother thought were 'suitable."" Christmas Days were mostly spent on the road between Newcastle and Dorset, where "my brother and I would scuff up our new Christmas jumpers from my father and his wife so that my mum wouldn't make fun of them." While her father and stepmother set great store on her doing well at school, "my mother could never remember what subjects I was taking." It was only when she had a child herself, Daisy Goodwin wrote, that she "realised exactly" what her mother had done - "which was to put her own happiness before her child's." The Pauper's Cookbook was born during the period when Jocasta Innes and Potts (with whom she had two more daughters) were living in bohemian penury in Swanage on £20 a week. "I wanted to know how to cook, how to clean," Jocasta Innes recalled. I never thought of it as drudgery or a lowering activity; I rather enjoyed it. The book sold well, and in 1976 she followed up with The Pauper's Homemaking Book, which applied the same approach to interior decoration. Another cookery book, Country Kitchen, was published in 1979. Paint Magic led to a television series for Channel 4, and in 1983 Jocasta Innes became the home editor of Cosmopolitan magazine. She went on to publish many more books with such titles as The Thrifty Decorator; Scandinavian Painted Décor; and Painted Furniture, and created a business to sell her decorating kits and paints, which later folded. One of her last books, Home Time: The Ultimate Manual for Dust and Stress-free Living, published in 2002, was billed as a manual for the post-feminist daughters of bra-burning mothers who had been too busy marching for equal pay to teach them how to wield a duster or sort the wash. Children, Jocasta Innes proclaimed, should be made to do housework from an early age: "It's like the Jesuits, just get them cleaning by the time they're seven and they'll be doing it for life!" After her marriage to Joe Potts broke up, in the early 1980s Jocasta Innes moved to Spitalfields, where she renovated a derelict brewer's house and began a new relationship with her next-door-neighbour, the modernist architect Sir Richard MacCormac. He and her children survive her. Jocasta Innes, born May 21 1934, died April 20 2013