Sophie Kinsella, author whose Shopaholic ‘chick lit’ novels caught the mood of the 2000s – obituary
Madeleine Sophie Townley was born in London on December 12 1969, the eldest daughter of a lecturer and a teacher; a younger sister, Gemma Townley, also became a novelist. She attended Putney High School, then, when her parents took over a prep school in Dorset, moved to Sherborne School for Girls.
A talented violinist, pianist and composer, she went up to New College, Oxford, to read music but switched in her second year to politics, philosophy and economics. Reading her essays aloud in tutorials, she recalled, was a searing lesson in the value of keeping it “snappy… with a joke or two”.
Her life diverged from the typical chick lit heroine’s in that she met “Mr Right” – a choral scholar called Henry Wickham – on the first night of university, and married him aged 21. They went on to have five children, and he gave up his career as a headmaster to manage her business affairs.
But she lived her life with a screwball energy worthy of her novels: when asked to address her New York publishers’ staff, she downed an entire bottle of Rescue Remedy “to get the minute alcoholic content”; when researching Shopaholic Ties the Knot, she took off her wedding ring and went to Vera Wang to try on all the dresses; when she hit a brick wall with a plot point, her husband would take her out for cocktails and together they would solve it.
In addition to the Shopaholic series, she published 12 standalone novels, a young adult novel and four books for children; her earlier Madeleine Wickham novels, subsequently reprinted, became bestsellers as well.
She is survived by her husband Henry Wickham, and their four sons and a daughter.
Sophie Kinsella, born December 12 1969, died December 10 2025
