To hold but not to have

Abigail Bosanko

Time Warner, 5.99

ABIGAIL Bosanko is a clever woman, but she wears her learning lightly. Just like the lexicographer heroine of her first novel, who slips into something sexy like a pair of silk knickers while quoting Virgil in the original Latin or eruditely pondering the derivation of the word ‘lingerie’ - it’s from the French linge, for linen.

Bosanko loves lingerie - the lacier and racier, the better - but she also has a penchant for the classics, as well as classic literature, and has even been known to retreat into etymology. So she has created chick-lit’s first literate chick.

Bridget Jones may lust after Elizabeth Bennet’s Darcy - or rather his TV alter ego Colin Firth - but Rose Budleigh, Bosanko’s protagonist, has a passion for seductive chaps like the Vicomte de Valmont of the epistolary novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses. As for Rochester, well... Tall, dark, handsome and brooding, what more could a thinking woman want ? Indeed, Jane Eyre is the leitmotif of the former English teacher’s deliciously comic novel, Lazy Ways to Make a Living, which is also expertly crafted around the metaphor of a chess game - the heroine’s a former champion.

Actually, says Edinburgh-based Bosanko, her book may be being marketed as chick-lit, but it is most definitely not about a miserable thirtysomething woman with a bad sex life who drowns her sorrows in Chardonnay while overdosing on the calories. "I am really tired of reading about sad women and bad sex, especially in laddish terms - all that dick-lit stuff," she says dismissively. "I thought the time had come to celebrate the joys of good sex." .

Lazy Ways to Make a Living is the unputdownable story of Rose, an academic, who resigned from her university post because the Dean would not forgive her campaign for the use of the imperative in the department’s mission statement. He wanted the subjunctive, so nothing ever got done. Rose fetches up in Edinburgh and eventually becomes a kept woman, living purely for pleasure as the mistress of the aforementioned dishy Jamie, who, by the way, reads Zola and Chekhov, plays a mean game of chess and buys her one peerless pearl, while she wallows in facials and manicures, and becomes a lady who lunches.

Needless to say, Rose’s career choice has had the hackette pack beating a path to Bosanko’s door. "I used to be a saleswoman," she confides, over quantities of coffee the morning after the day her book went on sale - some champagne was imbibed by way of celebration. She has also marketed whisky at the Scotch Malt Whisky Society, where she did her most favourite job ever as a whisky-tasting tutor.

"So I know you need a hook to promote anything, but especially a book. Yes, the kept woman angle is interesting because it’s deemed so politically incorrect in post-feminist terms, but it’s also a good marketing ploy, isn’t it?" she says with a knowing wink. In any case, she agrees, the canon has an honourable tradition of grandes horizontales - from the fast and louche ladies of Colette’s oeuvre, to Truman Capote’s Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

Nevertheless, the road to publication was littered with rejection slips. For Bosanko’s book has the distinction of being rejected by several publishers on the grounds of eroticism and political incorrectness. At one stage she was told no woman editor in London would touch her novel with a barge pole because it was so unfashionable to have a story about a kept woman.

"I feel really annoyed when people say that popular, entertaining literature is not worthy," she fumes, adding that it’s pure snobbery. "Take a novel like Irvine Welsh’s Porno. Now that is the intellectual’s Flashman novel, but it’s marketed as literature. I think it’s easier for a writer like him to plug into the literary market because he’s writing about grotesques.

"What I’ve done is write a book that it’s hard to take seriously, because it’s an unashamedly romantic novel aimed at women," says the 37-year-old Geordie, who was born and brought up in South Shields. Oops! She has just uttered the r-word. "Do not tell anyone it’s a romance," warned her editor. "People will immediately think of blue rinses." Which is not to say that the blue-rinse brigade will not enjoy this terrific book.

For the Newcastle University graduate has written a love story that works on two levels. It’s romantic fiction that is so wittily written that it makes you laugh out loud, but it’s also a novel about Bosanko’s love affair with books and sensuous relish for words and language. Rose’s emotional life is brilliantly mapped throughout the story by her current reading matter, which ranges from Charlotte Bronte to Nancy Mitford, from P G Wodehouse to Edith Wharton and Flaubert (Madame Bovary, of course).

Rose’s mother is a philosopher and feminist theologian. At one stage she tells her broken-hearted daughter: "I think you are having difficulty making the leap from Romanticism to Post-Modernism, darling." Aren’t all intelligent women, sighs Bosanko.

The author also hopes that Lazy Ways to Make a Living fits a description of entertaining literature that she once read by the writer and editor Robert McCrum. "After he had his near-fatal heart attack, he wrote that he had enjoyed reading authors like P G Wodehouse because they made him laugh. He said he had only wanted to read books that were as light as champagne and as heady as a cocktail. I’ll drink to that!"

And that’s a perfect summing up of her own fizzy, deliciously hedonistic book with its literary allusions, wicked turns of phrase and neat line in puns. (Rose’s sister Helen is a geneticist, who comes up with a suitably modified square potato for the burger chains. But, writes Bosanko, "when the chip hits the pan, anyone can get burnt".)

As we part, Bosanko reaches out to caress my slightly distressed copy of her novel. "I just want to kiss it," she explains. "Yours is the first one I’ve seen with a broken spine. It’s the most exciting moment of my life as a novelist." And then, sugar-pink scarf streaming behind her in the breeze, she dashes home to continue her second novel, Whisky Pink. I can’t wait to taste it.