Madeleine Wickham, a wide-ranging British author who splashed onto bestseller lists as Sophie Kinsella, the pen name she used for her “Shopaholic” series of rom-com books about an overspending fashionista, died Dec. 10. She was 55.
Her death was announced in a post on her Instagram account, which did not share additional details. Ms. Wickham revealed in April 2024 that she was receiving treatment for glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer.
Like many of the heroines in her more than 20 novels, which sold more than 50 million copies, Ms. Wickham had her share of frustration, missteps and twists of fate on her path to becoming what one reviewer called a “chick-lit goddess.”
She studied music and then economics at the University of Oxford — meeting her future husband on her first day on campus — and drifted into financial journalism by the early 1990s, writing for London-based publications including Pensions World. She knew she wouldn’t last. She took the “longest lunch hours known to mankind,” she once joked, to stay out of the office as long as possible.
She decided to try her hand at fiction, pecking away at a manuscript at work and then at home in the evenings. Under her own name, she published her first novel, “The Tennis Party” (1995), about a group of well-to-do friends spending the weekend at an English country estate, playing tennis, sipping Pimms and sneaking away for trysts.
The plot’s dark side — an attempt to lure others into a shady investment scheme — set the cornerstone for the books that to come: built around money, status, wannabes and smart but often flawed women.
“Personally, when I read books about women who fly around the world, have amazing sex and buy up companies, I never relate,” she toldThe Washington Post in 2012. “I try to write heroines that we relate to. You empathize with people when you feel sorry for them or feel like you’ve been in their place.”
A complete obituary will be published soon.
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