The joy of sexy fiction, by women for women

‘People who would otherwise never have dreamed of picking up a lowly romance novel are finding out just how diverse and how interesting the world of romantic fiction is.’ Photograph: Getty

In her article on reading smut, Zoe Williams focuses on the difference between romance and erotica (My weeks of reading hornily: steamy book sales have doubled - and I soon found out why, 6 August. To my mind, that misses the point. For me, it is about the difference between “good” smut and … well, just smut.

I am a 54-year-old Cambridge English literature graduate and I feel I have only just “discovered” smut when reading Sarah J Maas’s wonderful Acotar (A Court of Thorns and Roses) series earlier this year (by the way, those are the SJM books Williams should have chosen for her article, not the young adult Throne of Glass series, which has very little sex, in light of their intended audience).