Susannah Jowitt Examines the Romantasy Craze Among Midlife Readers
In a personal column for dailymail.com, 57-year-old writer Susannah Jowitt examines the booming popularity of romantasy fiction among middle-aged women, describing her own heavy consumption of the genre and the private WhatsApp networks where readers discuss these books. Romantasy—a hybrid of romance and fantasy featuring elements like vampires, werewolves, and fairies—has captured a massive audience, generating £63.5 million in UK sales for SciFi and Fantasy books in 2026 alone.
Reading Habits and Personal Revelations
Jowitt reports that she has read 26 romantasy titles in 2026 alone. Her reading list spans Sarah J. Maas’s complete A Court Of Thorns and Roses series, Katee Robert’s ten-title Dark Olympus series, and Kathryn Moon’s A Lady Of Rooksgrave Manor. She describes reading these books on her backlit Kindle while traveling on buses, trains, and planes, or during insomniac hours at home.
The essay details Jowitt’s lighthearted confession about her reading habits. She writes that she has been regularly unfaithful to her husband of 28 years with a giddying range of literary lovers including vampires, werewolves, and faeries. Jowitt notes that the explicit nature of these books often triggers physical reactions, comparing her experience to a young man watching pornography but without the associated sexual exploitation.
Market Scale and Cultural Reception
The genre’s commercial footprint is vast. UK readers spent £63.5 million on SciFi and Fantasy books in 2026 up to October, with 39 of the top 50 titles belonging to the romantasy category. Author Sarah J. Maas has sold more than 100 million books worldwide, and her titles accounted for 2 per cent of the entire UK fiction market by revenue last year. Thousands of fans queued at midnight for the recent release of Maas’s latest novel, A Court Of Splintered Harmony.
Despite these figures, Jowitt argues that literary snobs still condemn the genre as the guilty pleasure of spinsters and female neurodivergents. She recalls publishing two novels about female friendships in the late 1990s during the era of Bridget Jones, only to have a Cambridge graduate friend greet her success by asking her to write something worthy of her talents.
Escape, Empowerment, and WhatsApp Communities
Jowitt suggests that the predictable plots—ranging from enemies-to-lovers to forbidden love tropes—are secondary to the escapism the books provide. She notes that the pornography market offers vanishingly little content aimed at female viewers, leaving romantasy to fill a gap by offering vivid worlds and heated sex scenes.
According to the column, the genre’s heroines are outspoken about their desires in a way that serves as aspiration for women stuck in lacklustre relationships. Jowitt indicates that indulging in these books has improved the sex lives of many older women by empowering them to voice their needs or providing mental source material. She points out that one of her friends described A Lady Of Rooksgrave Manor as bilge that made her horny.
That friend and Jowitt now participate in a WhatsApp chat group comprising 40 midlife romantasy readers. While Gen Z dominates the broader demographics, Jowitt notes that readers in this network range in age from 17 to 82.
