Madeleine Wickham

Madeleine Wickham is the real name of, and the original pen name used by, bestselling author Sophie Kinsella. Writing as Wickham between 1995 and 2001, she published seven contemporary British social comedies -- beginning with The Tennis Party (1995) and ending with Sleeping Arrangements (2001) -- built around ensemble casts, class anxiety and property envy, in a register close to Jilly Cooper or early Joanna Trollope. Sleeping Arrangements was published the same year as her first Sophie Kinsella novel, Confessions of a Shopaholic, after which she wrote exclusively under the Kinsella name. Readers who know her only as Sophie Kinsella will find a grounded, more ensemble-driven version of her comic voice here, without the first-person confiding narration that became a Kinsella trademark. The Wickham novels have stayed in print largely on the strength of her later fame, with several reissued under her better-known pen name's readership in mind.