A SCOWLING, sloppily dressed middle-aged woman walks through the streets of London, offering no hint of her wild sexual thoughts or millionaire status.
Fame and fortune have come so fast to E.L. James, she hasn't had time to consult a personal stylist.
But Erika Leonard, the real name of the author behind the fastest-selling adult novel of all time, does have her sights set on a luxurious $4.5 million London property, according to the UK's Daily Mail.
The magnificent 17th-century Queen Anne mansion has seven bedrooms, four bathrooms and an indoor swimming pool, but not the "Red Room of Pain" that features in her explicit Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy.
Leonard, who admits she's embarrassed about becoming famous for penning graphic sex scenes with bondage and spanking, will probably keep it that way.
"I've got two teenage sons and they are mortified ... they don't want to think about the fact that their mother writes about sex," she said recently.
"But they've actually been very supportive."
No doubt the boys are happy to reap the benefits of the estimated $9.9 million their 49-year-old mother has earned in just a few months from her "midlife crisis" books.
What's hard to explain is why the tale of 22-year-old virgin Anastasia Steele entering a sadomasochistic relationship with troubled billionaire Christian Grey has become such compulsive reading the world over.
"I think the reason so many people like it is because it has rather naughty sex in it," Leonard told the Herald Sun last month.
"But it's also about first love and I think people are reading it and remembering the first time they experienced these feelings.
"Like Twilight, it's just the classic Beauty and the Beast-type story. These are stories that have existed forever."
The first novel in the salacious trilogy has become the fastest-selling adult book of all time.
Initially the success was put down to the relative anonymity of buying e-books online. But the latest figures show women have cast aside their inhibitions to boldly buy the book in shops.
Random House Australia says 26 million copies of the trilogy have sold in the US, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, India and South Africa. In Australia, 1.1 million copies of the trilogy have sold in just 11 weeks; 837,000 in print and the rest as e-books.
Melbourne psychologist and sex therapist Vikki Prior says books such as Fifty Shades of Grey help women to explore, embrace and accept their sexuality.
But she has also seen an increase in the number of women attending therapy for "sex addiction" in the form of fantasy fiction.
"Erotic fiction gives women permission and makes it OK for them to be interested in practices outside of the norm of what they are taught it is to be a sexual female," she says.
"My clinical experience tells me that the sexual needs of women are still often unmet in relationships."
Leonard's adoring fans have been greeting her with Oprah-like intensity at events in the US and UK, many of them standing up and thanking her for improving their sex lives.
Leonard, in turn, has told them that her husband of 25 years is worn out from all her research.
She has said she started writing Fifty Shades of Grey in 2009. Working as a BBC production manager, her primary responsibilities were contracts, budgeting, and finance, and she needed a creative outlet.
Basing her work on the "great love story" of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight saga, she posted it chapter by chapter on an Australian website for amateur romance writers, the Writers' Coffee Shop, under the pen name Snowqueens Icedragon.
In the accompanying biography she joked: "I am old enough to know better, but will try anything once - except incest and folk dancing - actually I've tried folk dancing and it's a hoot ... "
It's the type of humour that underpins the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy.
When the website's co-owner Amanda Hayward noticed Leonard's work was attracting a lot of attention, she decided to publish an e-book version.
That hit the No.1 spot on The New York Times e-book fiction bestseller list in March.
Despite worldwide media attention, information about Leonard's past is scant.
She was born in London to a Chilean mother and a Scottish father who was a BBC cameraman.
She was raised in Buckinghamshire, privately educated, then read history at the University of Kent before starting as a studio manager's assistant at the National Film and Television School in Beaconsfield. There she met her husband Niall, a TV screenwriter, whose credits include Wire in the Blood.
As Leonard said last month: "I had always wanted to be published but everyone told me that there was no way a book like mine would be."
No one realised how many desperate housewives were out there.
