Oxford University has always been a hotbed of literary talent, nurturing young, thrusting writers, eager to make their mark on the world of letters. But its bookish alumni are rarely associated with ‘chick lit’, that most female-focused and commercial of genres.

More’s the pity, says a defiant Abby McDonald, 24-year-old Oxford graduate and rising star of the chick-lit world.

“It’s wonderful that Oxford is this bastion of high art, where people take theatre, literature and classical music seriously. That’s important, but those really weren’t my interests while I was studying there. When I was sneaking off to write my chick lit, it felt rebellious.”

She has just had her first two novels published, Life Swap and Popularity Rules. She studied politics, philosophy and economics at Magdalen College, but her true passion was always popular culture: US soaps, pop music, teen romance novels.

While her fellow students were pontificating about Proust, Joyce and Brecht, she was in Borders thumbing through glossy magazines or holed up in her room devouring female fiction.

“The books I loved, that made me feel so happy and inspired, were chick lit novels,” she says. “I’d finish them with such a sense of possibility. So when I started writing at Oxford, I wanted to do the same sort of popular, mainstream, commercial stuff.”

Barely three years after graduating, Abby has achieved her aim. Life Swap, published for teenagers, tells the story of two female students, a free-spirited Californian sophomore and a prim, blinkered Oxford undergraduate, who swap places for a year and are forced to adapt to their new surroundings. Popularity Rules, which is October’s ‘Must Read’ in Glamour magazine, is about a girl who comes back from summer camp blonde, bubbly and suddenly popular to reveal to her best friend the secret of her newfound social success.

Speaking in Hoxton in East London, where she has recently set up home, Abby is rather bubbly herself. This is her first interview since bursting on to the literary scene.

“You can tell I don’t get to talk about my work much,” she giggles after one ten-minute monologue.

Life Swap deals with the experience of studying at Oxford — the prestige and splendour of the university, but also the cloying atmosphere of academic pressure and haughty high-mindedness of many students. Does this reflect her own experiences?

“I came from a state school and I did have mixed feelings about Oxford, I felt like a bit of an outsider and I got to magnify those feeling through Tasha, an American student who is so obviously an outsider at Oxford. People tend to get stuck in the bubble, subsuming themselves in intellectual rigour. And it’s a very competitive environment.”

Still, she sounds happy to have studied at Magdalen, with its magnificent grounds, skirted by the river Cherwell — even if, like Tasha, she was baffled by the lack of central heating and double-glazing. “It gets pretty cold in winter,” she says. And Oxford has given her a degree of steel. “When you study at Oxford, there’s a sense that you are special and fortunate – even if it’s not entirely fair — and that you might be capable of great things. Oxford teaches you to be individually ambitious.”

There’s certainly an air of confident determination to Abby, who, at 24, won three-book deal with Random House.

However, the path to her current glory wasn’t without hurdles. “I’m 24 but I’ve been writing seriously for five years. I’ve had hundreds of rejection letters along the way.”

The daughter of two teachers, she left Oxford realising that all she wanted to do was write fiction. She moved back to the Sussex village where she grew up and gave herself a year to make it, working part-time as a receptionist. She had to give up on two previous novels that were going nowhere, and has completely rewritten another from scratch. “This is the year it’s all actually happening,” she says.

She argues that, at its best, chick lit is a proudly feminist genre: “entertainment by women for women about women’s concerns, whether it’s about work, navigating a divorce or life post-motherhood”. What’s more, the writing is ‘a joy’, she says.

“I don’t want to write something that’s going to be a chore to read.”

* Life Swap is published by Walker at £6.99 and Popularity Rules at £6.99 by Arrow.