Background

Ethnicity: Her mother was Chilean and her father was Scottish.

Erika Mitchell was born on March 7,1963 in Willesden, Middlesex. She was brought up in Buckinghamshire.

Education

Erika was tutored privately at the independent Pipers Corner School located in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire. After Pipers Corner School she attended only girls' grammar school - the Wycombe High.

After the education at Wycombe High, she attended the University of Kent in Sout East England, where she got her academic degree in History.

Career

James worked as a manager at the television production company Shooting Stars and as a production executive at the British Broadcasting Corporation.

Although she was a longtime fan of romance novels, James had done little writing of her own. After viewing Twilight (2008), a film adapted from the first book of Stephenie Meyer’s popular series of vampire novels aimed at young adults, James was inspired to write stories based on Twilight characters. Such works belonged to a genre known as fan fiction, wherein amateur authors reimagined characters from popular books, films, or television series. Although some fan fiction was rooted firmly in the “universe” of its source material, other fan fiction retained little more than the names of existing characters or locations. James’s efforts fell into the latter category: Twilight’s Bella Swan changed from a brooding high-school student to a naive university student, and Edward Cullen, Bella’s vampire love interest, became a wealthy reclusive corporate executive. James adopted the pen name Snowqueens Icedragon and began posting her tale, titled Master of the Universe, in installments to a fan-fiction Web site in 2009. Her husband acted as her editor, and readers offered opinions on the direction of the story as each chapter was unveiled.

The racy Master of the Universe was a radical departure from the chaste Twilight, and readers devoured each installment of James’s sexually explicit tale. Over the following two years, James chronicled the steamy relationship of Bella and Edward in Master of the Universe and Master of the Universe II, and word-of-mouth recommendations attracted tens of thousands of readers to the series. In 2011 James severed her stories’ connections to Twilight - Bella was renamed Anastasia Steele and Edward became Christian Grey - though the underlying narrative was virtually unchanged.

James subsequently signed a contract with a small Australian publisher, and Master of the Universe, renamed Fifty Shades of Grey, was published in print and as an e-book in May 2011. The original versions of James’s stories were taken offline, and her second book, Fifty Shades Darker, was released in September 2011. The third book in the series, Fifty Shades Freed, was published in January 2012, and in February James signed a contract with the major international publisher Knopf Doubleday. In June 2015 James issued Grey: Fifty Shades of Grey As Told by Christian; the earlier installments had been from Steele’s perspective.

The Fifty Shades books promptly became best sellers on both sides of the Atlantic, with e-book sales contributing in large measure to that success. Just months after Fifty Shades of Grey’s major-publisher release, it became the top-selling book of all time on Amazon’s Kindle e-reader. In time, James’s overwhelmingly female readership achieved a global character as Fifty Shades of Grey was translated into dozens of languages, including French, Japanese, Korean, and Hebrew.

The first novel was adapted as a 2015 film starring Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson as Grey and Steele, respectively. Though subject to the same critical flogging as James’s novels, the movie was highly profitable. Two sequels followed, Fifty Shades Darker in 2017 and Fifty Shades Freed in 2018.

Achievements

• She wrote the bestselling erotic romance trilogy Fifty Shades of Grey, Fifty Shades Darker, and Fifty Shades Freed, along with the companion novels Grey: Fifty Shades of Grey as Told by Christian and Darker: Fifty Shades Darker as Told by Christian; and under the name Snowqueen's Icedragon the Twilight fan fiction "Master of the Universe" that was the basis for the Fifty Shades trilogy.
  
  The combined novels have sold over 125 million copies worldwide, over 35 million copies in the United States and set the record in the United Kingdom as the fastest selling paperback of all time. In 2012, Time magazine named her one of "The World's 100 Most Influential People." The novels were subsequently adapted into the films Fifty Shades of Grey, Fifty Shades Darker, and Fifty Shades Freed.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Fifty Shades of Grey 2011
  • Fifty Shades Darker 2017
  • Fifty Shades Freed 2012

Religion

Erica's mother is a Roman Catholic of Chilean descendence, her father is a Scottish Presbyterian man, but Erica never declared herself as a Roman Catholic nor as a Presbyterian.

Politics

Erika Leonard has never been in politics nor she has been a member of some political party.

Views

Quotations: "I wasn't aware we were fighting. I thought we were communicating."

"You can only be truly mad at someone you really love."

"There's a very fine line between pleasure and pain. They are two sides of the same coin, one not existing without the other."

"A man who acquires the ability to take full possession of his own mind may take possession of anything else to which he is justly entitled."

"Don't place some vague moral judgement on yourself based on what others might think. Don't waste your energy."

Personality

E.L. James is rather a shy and modest middle-aged lady living a lovely family life. She loves her husband and her children and has a great sense for humor. She is also an altrustic person.

Physical Characteristics: E.L James is now 53 years old. She is around 180 cm tall. Her prominent features are her dark hair and deep neckline. She has a very sturdy body. Her eyes are brown, small and in the shape of an almond.

Interests

• Watching TV shows

Connections

E.L. James is married to Niall Leonard, whom she met at National Film and Television School in Beaconsfield. They got married in 1987. They have two teenage sons and a terrier dog.

Spouse:

Niall Leonard