When the first of Jackie Collins’s novels, The World Is Full of Married Men, was published in 1968, there was a vast gap between the new expectation that women would freely have, and offer, sex and the actual sexual experience and expertise of most young women. To be good at sex they already had to have been bad – in every sense.
Since women had always been greedy readers of fiction and manuals of behaviour, a market opened for books that united both. Jackie’s work was not the first to combine a strong story with how-it-was-done sex – the success of Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls (1966) convinced publisher WH Allen to accept Married Men from an unknown author – but it wasoriginal and bold. It was followed by 31 further novels, nearly half a billion copies in total and all on the New York Times bestseller list. For more than 50 years, many interviewers, and most fans, began their conversation by saying Jackie had taught them everything they knew about sex.
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