Fifty Shades of Grey is now the fastest selling paperback in history. Its success has generated a debate about sex, fantasy and the nature of desire.
From a story in the Guardian...
Last month the first novel in this series telling the story of Anastasia Steele and her obsessive love for a man with a predilection for bondage and domination became the fastest-selling paperback since records began and last week it also became the first ebook to sell more than one million copies. Yet its story pivots on the young heroine's sexual submission to Christian Grey, a millionaire she scarcely knows, who promptly introduces her to his favourite fetishes, as well as to the contents of his "Red Room of Pain".
Sadomasochism has always had its articulate evangelists, from the Marquis de Sade, the 18th-century French libertine and erotic novelist, to Kenneth Tynan, the Observer's illustrious theatre critic, who once argued that spanking was the path to emotional and intellectual freedom. Yet James has managed to get millions of average readers to consider the place of erotic pain in a relationship without even advancing an argument or pretending to any literary merit. The book is "my midlife crisis writ large", Erika Leonard, the middle-aged British woman behind the pseudonym EL James, has recently admitted, adding that she put "all my fantasies in there".
So has James created the latest commercial genre for our age – what the commentator India Knight has called "the porn version of cupcakes and Cath Kidston"? Or does her racy trilogy answer a deeper, unmet need among women readers?
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