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Of course, we were reading to find out facts — how you actually Did It, what it felt like and so on — but while the reading took place, so did all kinds of formative literary and psychological tastes.

When I sent a round-robin e-mail to 50 or so women of my acquaintance, aged roughly 30-60, asking them what they’d read and found sexy as teenagers, the responses were surprisingly varied. Some women found “sexy” writing sexy — deliberately composed erotica, such as Anaïs Nin’s. Everyone, naturally, remembered the goldfish scene in Lace as being especially eye-popping (and what a pity that Shirley Conran meanly wouldn’t let me include it in the book, which would have introduced it to a whole new generation. Still, it’s her loss: I always preferred Judith Kranz myself).

But quite a lot of them were far subtler in their tastes, which is why my anthology has some bits that most people wouldn’t consider “dirty” at all if they were using the usual definition. A number of women, myself among them, found — and still find — Georgette Heyer’s wonderful Regency romances to be close to the absolute acme of sexiness: an exposed ankle here, a tap of the fan there, a saturnine, brooding Earl of Something, and we’re transported.

A friend in her sixties, who went on to work for a men’s magazine, remembered one innocent line from a historical novel about Bess of Hardwick, something about “breasts like apples”, which she says carries an erotic charge to this day. And I remember sitting in double English thinking Antony and Cleopatra was the sexiest thing I’d ever read; so sexy that I didn’t know where to look.

That was, of course, before I stumbled across Forever Amber, still one of my favourite books, though no longer the succès de scandale it was on its first publication in 1944 (it sold 3m copies and was the bestselling novel of the 1940s in America — despite, or because of, being banned in many places as “pornography”).

I don’t know who first said that women’s primary organ of arousal is the brain, but they weren’t wrong. Today’s young women seem to have been rather short-changed on that front, given that pornography has become ubiquitous. No wonder publishing houses have been especially set up to produce “erotica” for women: we are deluged with images, when we’d prefer some words.

It’s a strange fact of 21st-century life that while our society is more sexualised than ever, we’re more or less indifferent to it, by which I mean that we don’t walk around all day feeling frisky. We’re too busy feeling inadequate and anxious, I suppose, and insufficiently thin or Botoxed.

Book fashion changes all the time, especially when it comes to what is vexingly and patronisingly known (by men) as “women’s fiction”.

I feel deeply nostalgic for the 1980s bonkbuster, with its embossed jacket and 500 fat pages, not only because those books — they packed a serious punch — were chief among our sources of information when I was a teenager, but also because they had properly ballsy heroines, who’d more often than not clawed their way out of nowhere and ended up in positions of power through a combination of hard graft and judicious manoeuvring (in the bedroom as well as the boardroom).

I don’t want to credit these books with influence they don’t deserve, but I do think that their decline — they were eventually replaced by “mum lit”, in which heroines were domestic, desexualised and non-aggressive — is not insignificant. It’s fairly extraordinary that if you were to set out to find a risk-taking, society-defying, unconventional literary role model for your daughter, you’d be better off revisiting the “tame” historical novels of 50 years ago than you would picking up the newest chick-lit offering at your local Waterstone’s.

Obviously young women still read — this isn’t a lament in the face of illiteracy. But they’re more likely to be reading a blog on MySpace than they are Jane Austen, which seems a pity when they could be doing both. However, given that there is an interesting resurgence in very male, old-fashioned boys’ books at the moment — The Dangerous Book for Boys, but also a newly reissued compilation of the best and most macho bits from Commando magazine, not to mention the reappearance of Action Man — it may not be too much to hope for a female equivalent some day soon.

Just because young women are surrounded by sex doesn’t mean they’re not still curious, anxious, problematically (to them) naive or trepidatious: I think they’re more anxious than ever. After all, knowing about some arcane sexual practice because you’ve seen it online doesn’t exempt you from wondering what kissing might feel like. The answer’s in Jane Eyre. Sometimes, the old ones are the best.

The Dirty Bits For Girls, edited by India Knight, is published by Virago on November 2, £10

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