Sophie Kinsella

Novelist who turned the everyday chaos of modern womanhood into bestselling, big-hearted comedy

- Patrick Kidd

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 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.