I first heard of this book sometime in 2012 when my fifteen-year-old daughter announced that it was all the talk at her private girls’ high school in Oxford. It appears that the book had become unofficial required reading for fifth and sixth graders, and in due course a copy came home. I had often complained that my daughter didn’t read enough, she was mainly limited to reading forced by her studies, but this book was also forced by her peer pressure. She in due time announced that she had finished the book and I asked her how she had found it. It was said that it wasn’t right for you, dad, and it was pretty badly written.

That was three years ago, and it seems that by then the book had already broken many sales records. I discovered that on August 1, 2012, Amazon UK had announced that it had sold more copies of Fifty Shades of Gray than the entire Harry Potter series combined, making EL James their best-selling author, replacing JK Rowling. My daughter had never shown any interest in the Harry Potter series, and none of these volumes appeared on our shelves, so the temporary intrusion of Fifty Shades of Gray represented her first step into what might be called popular fiction created for a market. massive.

With my curiosity piqued, I looked up literary reviews of the book and discovered that its erotic nature had led to it being nicknamed ‘Mommy Porn’ because it was supposed to be more popular with married women over the age of thirty. However, it was also said to be popular with teenage girls and college students, a fact I was able to confirm from my daughter’s reports. I also learned that the popularity of the book had sparked a renewed interest in erotic literature, leading to the reissue of previous bestsellers in this genre. However, I am not aware of any lingering interest developing in my daughter’s school, the Fifty Shades of Gray apparently cast her fleeting shadow and left in a clear blue sky.

Not having read the book, I can’t write a review, but many literary critics have reported that Fifty Shades of Gray is poorly written and has a ‘negligible plot’. Sir Salman Rushdie is reported to have said that he had never seen anything so badly written get published. So it seems that my daughter is in good company in the trial of her writing. This prompts the question: why is the book so popular? Maybe I should go back to my own school days to find the answer. By the 1950s, DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover was being condemned as obscene, and flat-cover copies were circulating. Then, as now, I suspect, the real interest was confined to a few well-thumbed pages.