Fiction: Recent cases of older women seducing schoolboys have generated huge media attention; the charges themselves are unfortunately commonplace, but the reversal of sexes of the protagonists is not.
Journalist Zoë Heller has taken up the theme in this, her second novel, Notes on a Scandal.
It is the end of the 1990s, and Sheba Hart arrives as pottery teacher at a London comprehensive, idealistic about inspiring her less than motivated pupils. Sheba is 40, upper middle-class, married with two children. She's ridiculously naïve about school life; pottery was a late vocation and this is her first teaching job. She's also very pretty.
Bored with her home life, and disillusioned with teaching, Sheba convinces herself that the crush which teenage pupil Steven Connolly soon declares is actually meaningful love.
"I'm really into you, Miss" is enough for Sheba to start her canter towards disaster: sex, delusion (on her part), this is a meeting of equals and, inevitably, exposure, disgrace, collapse of marriage, and a media-hungry trial follow.
Sheba's story is narrated throughout by fellow-teacher Barbara Covett, whose failed life is the real focus of the novel. Odious Barbara is of retirement age, single, lonely and, by turns, jealous of and scornful of Sheba's life. She befriends her, betrays her, and then moves in to pick up the pieces. Sheba's misfortune is Barbara's opportunity to matter.
The entire novel is written in an old- fashioned, self-consciously prurient tone, which winds on as relentlessly as a tourniquet. Notes on a Scandal attempts to be a portrait of late middle-aged loneliness, sexual jealousy and self-deprecation, but it fails to transform cat-obsessed spinster Barbara into anything other than a crude caricature of an unlikable and lonely old Englishwoman.
This is a novel about small lives and smaller minds; a read as small and bitter as an unripe olive.
Rosita Boland is an Irish Times journalist and poet. Her most recent collection is Dissecting the Heart (Gallery)
Notes on a Scandal By Zoë Heller Penguin Viking, 244pp. £14.99