THE Daily Mail’s Jan Moir spares us the misery of reading E L James’s latest ‘novel’ in her sado-masochistic series Fifty Shades of Grey, saying that it contains ‘some of the cheesiest dialogue ever written’ along with pornographic perversion. Thankfully it is the last of the oeuvre.
After two hundred years of outstanding female novelists – Jane Austen, Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë, George Eliot, to name the most brilliant – we now have ‘romance’ repackaged as violence against women. Somehow this has escaped the vigilance of feminists, perhaps because the fictional heroine consents to being beaten up. Indeed, the series will probably be showered with literary awards for female empowerment. And of course it is hugely profitable.
Feel free to discuss this or anything else on your mind.
