All this is explained to me by the interviewee's PR woman while Bennett herself toddles off with my coat and hangs it on an empty rack down the other end of her vast white office, perched above her shop in Brook Street, central London.

The office has floor-to-ceiling windows, offering an extraordinary view down South Moulton Street. While the PR woman apologises and suggests a shoot another day, Bennett takes a seat behind a long white trestle table — her desk — and grins uneasily like a guilty schoolgirl. She says nothing, which makes me think that she would probably prefer to do the speaking part of the interview without me, too.

The truth is that Bennett, 39, hates giving interviews and rarely offers them. She is only talking to me because she was asked to by the organisers of the Veuve Clicquot Business Woman of the Year award, which she won on Thursday. By the time you are reading this, she will have been on television, too — sheer agony — so I like to think of myself as an easy warm-up for that. Suffice it to say, though, this was one of those meetings where I did most of the talking.

That is a shame because Bennett, one of the UK's rising entrepreneurs, has a great story to tell, and enough mates in
the business to sing her praises.

She set up her first shop in suburban Wimbledon in 1990, before moving into central London in 1994. Now she has 400 employees and a chain of 44 outlets across Britain selling shoes — for which she is renowned — clothes and accessories, many designed by her, all pitched in that lucrative niche between mainstream high street and expensive designerwear. This year, she says, the LK Bennett group (LK stands for Linda Kristin, her first and middle names) will turn over close to £40m.

But worth more than that, perhaps, is the chain's meticulously constructed brand image: soigne, stylish, affordable. And this might just explain Bennett's reluctance to pop her head above the parapet. Unlike those entrepreneurs who take the Branson approach to keeping in the media eye, Bennett prefers to operate more discreetly. That way, perhaps, the mystique is preserved.

"I just think the product is the most important thing to put forward, rather than me," she says with a shrug. "And I'd rather focus on running the business than talking about it."

Fair enough. Others suggest that, along with the huge slugs of willpower and determination that have propelled her rise, a cagey reticence has been characteristic, too. "A lot of the key data she keeps to herself," says one retailer who knows her well, "and when you meet, the barriers do come down more frequently than with other retailers. That's because Linda's an entrepreneur, not a professional manager."

So there we are, sitting in her big, echoey, white room, both smiling anxiously. Bennett, short, stocky, with big brown eyes and long brown hair, is dressed head to foot in black — she always wears black — and looks like a rather beautiful hamster off to a funeral. She tells me later that, while she was brought up in London, she is half-Icelandic, and that, I suppose, might account for a bit.

But she is not at all frosty or clipped, just hesitant. This makes for awkward conversation. Answers slip into silence, and long gaps appear mid-reply which you instinctively want to fill in. Then she'll smile at my attempts to find words for her, and say "exactly", before giggling that she got away with it.

The secret of her success, she agrees, is that she designs what she herself likes and covets, and she sticks to a consistent look. And before she set up her first shop, she worked around the industry — as an assistant in stores such as Whistles and Joseph, as a designer in shoe factories, and as a student at design college — so she had the bases pretty well covered before she started.

She launched it all on £13,000 in savings and a £15,000 loan from Barclays bank, and she still owns 100% of the business. She clearly values the control that gives her.The chain's expansion is funded out of cashflow, nobody else can tell her what to do.