Penny Vincenzi
Clever and charismatic journalist turned bestselling novelist with a flair for managing complex plots
PENNY VINCENZI, the writer, who has died aged 78, sold her first story aged eight and went on to become a fashion journalist and romantic novelist, the author of some 17 bestsellers which have sold more than seven million copies worldwide. Astute, vivacious, tough-minded, funny, and popular both with colleagues and rivals, Penny Vincenzi never made any claims to literary merit, unashamedly placing her novels in the “sex-andshopping” category. Indeed it was through the acknowledged queen of the genre, Jilly Cooper, whom she had been sent to interview in 1988, that she got her first break into best-sellerdom.
Jilly Cooper put her in touch with her agent: “I had the plot in my head already … When they told me it was sold for £100,000 before I’d written a word, I nearly passed out!”
As her first novel, Old Sins (1989), raced up the charts, she gave up the day job and went on to churn out blockbuster after blockbuster, often running to 600-odd pages, every two years, on average. “I try to write them short,” she explained to an interviewer, “but I just can’t. I’m always turning in 300,000, 330,000 words. It must be ingrained in me.”
Her stories usually featured strong women battling their way to success – and love – in a male-dominated world, and settings ranged from the country houses of the Roaring Twenties, through the swinging Sixties to the boom and bust of more recent years.
All her books, Penny Vincenzi explained, were based on the simple question “What if?” “What if you were left a lot of money?” (Windfall); “What if a bride disappeared on the morning of her wedding?” (Another Woman).“what if your husband asked you to perjure yourself for him, to keep him out of jail?” (The Dilemma); “What if you had been abandoned as a baby, or had abandoned a baby?” (Sheer Abandon).
Penny Vincenzi described herself as “a storyteller who can make people forget their own lives and problems”, though reviewers could be sniffy. “Her heroes and heroines,” observed one, “are without exception well-heeled, well-dressed (in good designer labels), well-educated (Eton, Wycombe Abbey, Oxbridge), physically well-endowed and generally well pleased with themselves. They have Islingtonian names such as Sandy, Serena, Nico and Anna …”
Yet her books offered plenty of glamour, romance and action, and she was adept at managing labyrinthine plots – The Best of Times (2009), for example, explored the effects of a motorway pile-up on an extensive cast. Her characters were vividly drawn and she was genuinely sad to say goodbye to them when a book was finished.
Indeed, the story of Penny Vincenzi’s own move from journalist to becoming one of the highest earning authors in the country could have leapt straight from the pages of one of her novels.
She was born Penelope Hannaford at Bournemouth on April 10 1939, the only child of a bank-manager father and housewife mother, and grew up surrounded by books.
When she was eight she laboriously tapped out in triplicate a little magazine of her own stories on her mother’s typewriter, which she took to school and sold to her friends for tuppence. By her teens, she had progressed to “dreadful novels, full of forbidden passion and harrowing childbirth scenes”.
She was educated at Totnes High School, then, after the family moved to London, at Notting Hill and Ealing High School. After training at a “posh secretarial college”, she landed her first job on her local parish magazine (“I was fired for being glib about the Ladies’ Sewing Guild”) after which she became a junior secretary at Vogue (“just like The Devil Wears Prada, except I wasn’t beautiful like Anne Hathaway”). She then moved to the society magazine Tatler, where she became the editor’s secretary.
In 1960 she married Paul Vincenzi, an advertising consultant with whom she had fallen in love aged 19, and two years later joined the Daily Mirror, where she worked for the women’s editor Marjorie Proops for a year before moving to the fashion department.
She went on to become fashion editor of the magazine Nova, from which she was fired after a year (“because I wasn’t very good”). Six months later she went to Woman’s Own as beauty editor, then Options and Cosmopolitan magazine. “It was such a wonderful time and I absolutely loved it,” she recalled of the Sixties fashion scene.
Mary Quant was a friend, as were the fashion designers John Bates and Jean Muir. She also became close to Barbara Hulanicki, the founder of Biba. “Creatively we were pushing back all the boundaries and everything was in free fall.”
She was also known for taking a keen personal interest in the lives and careers of those with whom she worked, and she was a great supporter of younger women.
Her last novel, A Question of Trust, was published in October 2017. She always expressed the desire to die at her typewriter and had recently signed a deal for a new novel to be based round a Sixties-style fashion house.
Penny Vincenzi’s husband Paul died from a brain tumour in 2009 and she herself developed a rare blood disorder which almost killed her in 2013. She is survived by four daughters.
Penny Vincenzi, born April 10 1939, died February 25 2018