The Twilight Saga

Fifty Shades began as Twilight fan fiction, published chapter by chapter online under the title Master of the Universe, with Bella and Edward's names on the characters. E. L. James has never disputed this; the book was rewritten with the names changed and the supernatural removed, and published as original fiction. What survived the change:

• The structure: an inexperienced young woman narrating in first person, drawn to a wealthy, controlling, much-discussed man who warns her away from himself
• Ana and Christian as Bella and Edward with the vampirism taken out and the control kept, which is what makes the second book read as an argument the first one started
• The best friend, the protective family, the car, the watching

Filed HIGH. This is the strongest form the connection can take: not an influence on a book but the literal draft it was rewritten from.

Stephenie Meyer wrote Eclipse as her Wuthering Heights book and put the novel in it as a prop. Bella reads it through the book, it is quoted at the chapter heads, and Meyer has discussed the parallel in interviews. The tie-in edition of Wuthering Heights was published with a Twilight cover for that reason. What carries:

• A love presented as destructive and inevitable rather than as a good thing, which the novel treats as a fact about the characters rather than a flaw to fix
• Heathcliff as the model for a male lead who is dangerous to the heroine and is loved for it rather than in spite of it
• The triangle of the wild outsider, the settled respectable choice, and a woman who cannot let either go

Filed MEDIUM. The debt is real and stated, but it belongs to one book of four, and Twilight's own machinery (the vampire rules, the Quileute wolves, the Volturi) owes Brontë nothing.

Stephenie Meyer has said each book of the saga was built on a classic, and Twilight on Pride and Prejudice.

• A first meeting that goes badly, with Edward's apparent disgust in the biology class playing the part of Darcy's pride at the assembly
• A heroine who misreads the hero's reserve and is corrected by what she learns about him
• The courtship as a sequence of misunderstandings rather than obstacles

Filed MEDIUM: it shapes the first book of four.

New Moon is Meyer's Romeo and Juliet book and says so in the text. It opens with Friar Laurence's "These violent delights have violent ends", Bella and Edward watch the play together on her birthday, and Edward explains why he envies Romeo. The climax is the play's final act with the ending changed: Edward, believing Bella dead, goes to Volterra to die, and she reaches him in time.

Meyer has named A Midsummer Night's Dream, with The Merchant of Venice, as the plays behind Breaking Dawn. The debt is to the play's treatment of love as something that happens to people rather than something they choose, which is how the book handles Jacob's imprinting. Filed LOW: one book, and a theme rather than a plot.