E.L. James’s Fifty Shades trilogy has become a huge success and sold millions of copies. The novels’ mix of romance and erotica has been described as something new. Reading these books mainly as ro-mance, Nilson focuses on how James uses well known and estab-lished romance traits from, for example, the so-called “bodice-rip-per” novel and chick lit, in order to create a hybrid. These traits are visible in both how James describes her protagonists and in how the relationship between them is portrayed. Nilson argues that the Fifty Shades trilogy is, rather than a new kind of romance, a compila-tion of well-established traits