Author

born: April 10th 1939

died: February 25th 2018

Penny Vincenzi, who has died aged 78, was a bestselling author who started late in life, but continued with a prolific streak which would be the envy of most writers. Her first novel Old Sins was published in 1989, in her fiftieth year, but after that she wrote another sixteen weighty sagas and two collections of stories, until last year’s A Question of Trust. By 2014 her books had sold more than seven million copies.

Vincenzi’s stories were old-fashioned page-turners, not hugely fashionable in literary circles, but extremely popular among her loyal readers. She wrote epics which spanned the 20th century and on into the present day, from the vanishing bride mystery of Another Woman to Wicked Pleasures’ rifle through the family secrets of the banking aristocracy and, perhaps closest to home, More Than You Know’s tale of a glamorous 1950s magazine editor.

Prior to her career as a novelist, Vincenzi had been a journalist for publications including the Mirror, the Times, the Daily Mail, Vogue and Cosmopolitan, specialising largely in fashion, and she had also been the fashion editor of Nova magazine. She and her husband Paul, an advertising agency executive, briefly founded the consumer lifestyle magazine Looking Good, which was given away throughout the Boot’s chain, in the early 1970s; although it was a success, the couple nearly lost their house during the launch period, and returned to their former careers when it folded.

By the time of her switch to novel-writing, Vincenzi had already published two mass-market non-fiction books – The Compleat Liar in 1977 and There’s One Born Every Minute: A Survival Guide For Parents in 1984 – and her first fiction book came about as a result of her work in journalism. “I asked Jilly Cooper for advice while interviewing her for a magazine profile and she put me in touch with her own agent and he held an auction based on an outline and three chapters,” she told the Sydney Morning Herald in 2012. “I hadn’t the faintest idea how to write a book. I knew what to do with language and words, of course. In the end I just had to adapt.”

She arrived at the concept for each book and then never plotted it out in full, allowing the characters to arrive at their own destination, although she was a fan of writing a killer first line in particular; she was particularly proud, apparently, of The Decision’s “Eliza was in the middle of curtseying to the Queen, when she decided it was time she lost her virginity.” Her books were renowned for their weight, regularly arriving at more than 300,000 words and the better part of 1,000 pages, and strong female leads were her mainstay. “I like using (them) because I envy them a lot,” she told the Telegraph. “I could never dominate a boardroom or anything like that.”

Born Penelope Hannford in Bournemouth to parents Stanley and Mary (nee Hawkey), Vincenzi was an only child with “the most ordinary background you could possibly imagine.” She grew up in Devon and was educated at Notting Hill and Ealing High School in London, where she edited the school magazine, and was first employed in the library of department store Harrods (which closed in 1989; Old Sins was one of the last books it stocked). She joined the Daily Mirror as a secretary, where the then-woman’s editor Marjorie Proops – who was “very keen always to promote as many of the bright girls as I could” – supported her application to join the NUJ.

Based in later life between home in London and a cottage in Wales’ Gower Peninsula, Vincenzi was married to Paul between 1960 and his death in 2009. She continued to write through ill-health later in life, and is survived by four daughters, Polly, Sophie, Emily and Claudia, and eight grandchildren.

Dave Pollock