If you don’t know what Mills & Boon is, it’s trashy women’s lit. (This article is still relevant if you’re not a girl.)

It’s the rotating shelf in the library where all the books look the same: a variation on a man in uniform being leaned on by a young woman with voluptuous red lips and scant clothing. If you have ever read Jacqueline Wilson, it’s what the young protagonist’s two-dimensional grandmother, with her bad hip and her box of chocolates, would curl up with on the sofa at the end of the day.

Mills & Boon are the publishers synonymous with the notorious genre of ‘women’s romance’. They deal in adult fairy stories, in which the attractive (younger) woman eventually succumbs to the advances of the stern, successful businessman, who is himself redeemed by his love for her. Needless to say, few people consider them to be ‘serious’ literature. At the Faculty of English, there’s one absolute hero who devotes two lectures a year to argue that Mills & Boon are equally as good as Jane Austen.

The perception of Mills & Boon as ‘trashy women’s literature’ is part of a larger, self-perpetuating misogyny which has dogged literary studies for as long as that’s been a thing at universities, and the writings of ‘men of letters’ before that (there was never really such thing as a ‘woman of letters’). Henry James bewailed the rise of the woman reader as heralding an age of sentimentality and moral decline in the novel, conveniently forgetting that the earliest novelist to court emotional excess and general melancholy was none other than Samuel Richardson. But there’s a particularly fierce snobbery set aside for anyone who dares to earn their living writing erotica, or fritter their intelligence reading it.

Yet, at least until they can make it big, excellent writers populate the Mills & Boon scene. Anaïs Nin was forced to produce erotica for much of her life: it’s often commercially more viable than ‘serious’ fiction, and what does that tell us about their relative appeal?

There’s more. Writing erotica is difficult, because it’s subjective and highly personal. Creative writing generally invites – maybe even demands – that the writer should draw on their experiences, but this becomes difficult in a realm as intimate and insecurity-ridden as the bedroom (or multiple other locations, for that matter). Besides this, a sloppy sentence about tea and jam might go unnoticed in Jane Austen. Bad erotica really is bad, so much so that the Literary Review set up the Bad Sex in Fiction Award to recognise particularly toe-curling descriptions of fictional romantic encounters. Here are a select few:

'Now his big generative jockey was inside her pelvic saddle, riding, riding, riding, and she was eagerly swallowing it swallowing it swallowing it with the saddle’s own lips and maw – all this without a word. But then he began moaning.

Like a lepidopterist mounting a tough-skinned insect with a too blunt pin he screwed himself into her.'

You’re welcome. But there is a serious point to be made here, which is that bad sex writing comes of writers trying to euphemise sexual experiences. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that what really makes us cringe are the ill-fitting substitutions of ‘big generative jockey’ and ‘pin’ (ouch) for, well, penis.

If bad erotica is born of a flamboyant and sometimes aggressive use of metaphor which conceals a coy reluctance to engage fully in a discussion of sex, it seems to me that good Mills & Boon overthrows inhibitions with which readers and writers alike – especially women – still struggle to this day. For Virginia Woolf, killing the ‘Angel in the House’, the virtuous, self-sacrificing and sexually neutral paragon of innocent girlhood, was incremental to becoming a successful writer. “I took up the inkpot and flung it at her,” writes the young Virginia. “She died hard.”

The Daily Mail (typically) ran a story in 2013 arguing that romantic fiction was failing women by perpetuating unrealistic ideas of romance, and therefore ruining readers’ chances of enjoying a satisfactory relationship in the real world. Perhaps, if you are actually left with the impression that your one true love awaits you in a 1950s sailor suit on his own private yacht. Otherwise, no. Read Mills & Boon. It could either be hilarious, or it could be life-changing