Like Jane Austen or Helen Fielding, Sophie Kinsella loved a flawed heroine. “When I read books about women who fly around the world, have amazing sex and buy up companies, I never relate,” the author said in 2012.
“You empathise with people when you feel sorry for them or feel like you’ve been in their place.” In Becky Bloomwood, the hapless, compulsive spender of her Shopaholic series of nine novels, Kinsella created someone readers could easily identify with.
The Secret Dreamworld of a Shopaholic, published in 2000 when credit was easily available and hard to resist, follows a young financial journalist who cannot control her spending. It begins with Bloomwood opening a £2,000 Visa bill and assuming she has been the victim of fraud. It is only as she goes down the items, rationalising why each was absolutely essential to buy, that she admits it was all her own splurge.
There was, Kinsella admitted, plenty of herself in Becky. The author once set out to visit a museum and returned with a new sofa, and cheerfully acknowledged moments of “Becky logic”, when buying something unnecessary at a discount felt like saving money. While some dismissed the books as frothy “chick lit” (she preferred “wit lit”), others said she had astutely observed the real lives and foibles of her audience.
“You can be highly intelligent and also ditzy,” she told the Guardian. “My readers are not stupid. They are real people with a shallow end and a deep end, and I’m just putting the whole picture out there.” That warmth and comic humanity helped her sell more than 50 million books.
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Kinsella had published five novels under her married name of Madeleine Wickham before she pitched the first Shopaholic novel. She wrote The Tennis Party in 1993, as a bored 24-year-old journalist working on magazines such as Pensions World and Resident Abroad. It was determinedly not autobiographical. “I took the longest lunch hours known to mankind,” she later said. The book sold well, leading to a large advance for three more, but as she appoached 30, she wanted to try a lighter, more personal style. “I thought: ‘OK, I will write a silly book about things I know and just make it funny and ridiculous’,” she said. Unsure if it would succeed, she submitted it under a pseudonym combining her middle name and her mother’s maiden name, reasoning that if it flopped “it would have nothing whatsoever to do with me”. She refused to do signings or interviews,and only revealed her identity in 2003 on the publication of her first standalone Kinsella novel, Can You Keep a Secret?
Madeleine Sophie Townley was born in 1969 and raised first in south London and then Dorset, where her parents ran a prep school. She went to New College, Oxford, initially to read music but switched to politics, philosophy and economics.
On her first night at university, she met her future husband, Henry Wickham, a fourth-year classicist and choral scholar. On hearing him sing Short People by Randy Newman, she was smitten. “It was seismic,” she said. “I thought, ‘Oh my God, I have to have him.’ His voice completely did it for me.” They married when she was 21 and would have four sons and a daughter. He gave up a job as a headteacher in 2017 to be her business manager.
Confessions of a Shopaholic, a film version of the first two novels, was made in 2009 with Isla Fisher as Becky, though the setting was moved to Manhattan. Fisher described Bloomwood as “a hilarious flawed dream of a comic character – and I was lucky enough to step into her shoes”. Ten years later, Can You Keep a Secret? was also made into a film. A musical version of her novel Sleeping Arrangements opened in London in 2013.
The writer Sophie Hannah first met Wickham when she won the Betty Trask prize for her debut novel in 1995. “She looked so young that I thought ‘She must be amazing’,” Hannah recalled. She read The Tennis Party on holiday, then passed it to her husband, who loved it too; buying the latest Madeleine Wickham then became a ritual.
Hannah remembers picking up the first Shopaholic book in a WH Smith at King’s Cross, unaware it was by the same author: “I opened the first page and read the words ‘OK. Don't panic’. I was captivated by the freshness and directness. It felt fun.”
She later discovered that Wickham and Kinsella were one and the same. “Her writing had very different styles depending on the name. That was what made me think that she was a literary genius.” Kinsella wrote more than 30 books, including Finding Audrey (2015) for young adults and the children’s illustrated Mummy Fairy and Me (2018).
In 2024, Kinsella revealed that she had been diagnosed two years earlier with glioblastoma, an aggressive and incurable form of brain cancer. She first noticed something was wrong when she started to trip and stumble. After an eight-hour operation to remove the tumour, she experienced memory loss but channeled her emotions into her final book, What Does It Feel Like?, in which a novelist has the same illness and has to be re-taught the words to her favourite Christmas carols by her husband.
Having begun her career determined not to write autobiography, this was inevitably her most personal work. “I didn’t want to write a gloomy book but I did want to write about my experience,” she said. “It was cathartic.” What especially comes through is the tenderness of the couple in the story, reflecting Henry’s devotion in looking after her. “He’s always got these stories of optimism,” she said. “Most of all, it is a book about love.”
Sophie Kinsella, pen name of Madeleine Wickham, was born on 12 December 1969 and died on 10 December 2025, aged 55
Photograph by Andrew Stawicki/Toronto Star via Getty Images