A FEW years ago, Rowan Pelling's mother was approached in the street by a woman who was at pains to tell her how very, very sorry she was. When Hazel Pelling asked exactly what it was she was so sorry about, the woman replied: "You know, Rowan - doing all that erotic business."

Mrs P assured her that, on the contrary, she was very proud of her daughter - who at the time was proving a prodigious success as editor of The Erotic Review - at which point the woman, barely missing a beat, confided: "Actually, I'm thinking of buying a subscription to the magazine for my husband this Christmas."

This, according to Rowan Pelling, is typical of the British attitude towards sex.

"There's a complete contradiction between what the British say, and what they actually do," says Pelling, 38.

"Underneath, the British are just as sexual as any other country. There's that famous quote - the continentals have a sex life and the British have a hot water bottle. In my experience that's not true, but we carry on as if it were."

If anyone is qualified to talk about this, it's Rowan Pelling
* in her own words, she's "spent the last decade thinking about the British and sex".

"If I had a fiver for every time I've been called 'a nice girl in a naughty business', I'd be a very rich woman," she says. "The British absolutely love a posh woman talking dirty.

Right from the beginning, the first radio interview I did as editor of The Erotic Review, I got fan letters from people who loved this naughty girl talking about orgasms.

"It's interesting, posh women in Britain can get away with being rude and talking dirty, but posh men can't. And I'm not really posh - I'm just incredibly lucky my mother spent a lot of time making us say our vowel sounds properly.

How could I have known it would come in so handy in my erotic career?"

Pelling's journey from editor's assistant on the likes of Private Eye and GQ to mouthpiece for Middle England's not-so secret sexual desires was something of an accident: In 1997, she agreed to help out some friends by editing a newsletter for The Erotic Print Society. She was, she admits, partly a "figurehead editor" - because it was better PR to have a young woman talking about sex than the middle-aged men who actually ran the company.

But within a couple of years, what had been a foolscap news sheet had been transformed into The Erotic Review, a thriving magazine with a circulation of 30,000 that counted such eminent writers as Oberon Waugh and Alain de Botton among its regular contributors. So what was her secret?

"Nice girl talking dirty!" she laughs. "Also, I did know a lot of good writers. Being an editor's assistant, I'd obviously photocopied the address books! And I think I do have quite good instincts for PR. And, of course, sex sells."

Pelling says the magazine appealed to the "naturally flirtatious relationship between young women and middle-aged men" - something she fully admits was reflected in her own relationship with her publishers.

"Essentially I'm a barmaid," she says. "My parents ran the village pub in Kent for 34 years and a bit of me is always going to be a barmaid, serving a pint to a flirtatious squire.

"That was my childhood and that's what I did as an editor. It's that Babs Windsor thing - whatever I do, I'll still be a barmaid at heart."

Not surprisingly, her seven years at The Erotic Review proved eyeopening.

"Working on a magazine like that does change you, and it changes the things people tell you and the way they behave towards you," says Pelling.

"You suddenly end up doing stuff you never thought you would do, like going to S&M parties. I once smacked an old man's bottom with a cane because this chap desperately wanted someone to, and I thought, 'Well, it's no skin off my nose'.

"And people would tell you their secrets, because they knew you weren't going to be shocked. They'd tell you about their spanking and their mistresses and their S&M and whatever it was; quite well known, really quite famous people would tell you the most extraordinary things.

"And their secrets will remain safe with me," she adds with a smile.

Pelling quit The Erotic Review in 2004 when new owner IPM, which also publishes top shelf title Penthouse, moved the office from London to Cobham in Surrey.

"They didn't understand that the magazine was essentially a Soho club," she says. "You don't get away with paying top, top people like Damien Hirst and Boris Johnson so little money without offering them something else.

"The people who bought it were basically pornographers and pornographers only understand things through commerce. They thought everyone did what they did for the money, but we didn't. That's why we were such rubbish pornographers - the only pornographers in the history of the world who didn't make any money!

"It's probably because we weren't quite pornographers, but I think it sounds pretentious to say we were 'eroticists' - the distinction didn't matter. It was a dirty mag - a literary dirty mag."

Pelling moved on to new projects, including a weekly column for the Independent On Sunday and a monthly article for Agent Provocateur's website - for which she gets paid in lingerie.

Despite initial misgivings, she also settled into a new life in Cambridge with her husband Angus and two-year-old son, Scobie. "I married Cambridge," she says. "I moved here to be with my husband, who was working on Granta. I was very reluctant because I'd hated Oxford, and I'm a Soho girl, really. It took me a while to adjust to Cambridge life, but I love it now."

Pelling - a self-confessed "old-fashioned romantic at heart" - describes Angus, who is 15 years older than her ("I married a middle-aged man, I married my readership!") as "a typically repressed Cambridge person".

"When I was running The Erotic Review, it was always more difficult to say what I did at a dinner party in Cambridge," she explains.

"And yet we had twice as many subscribers in Cambridge as Oxford, even though it's half the size. I think there's something in that scientific, high-functioning, autistic sensibility that, when rocked, has quite a crazed sexuality.

Cambridge is full of these contrary currents."

Currently, Pelling is revisiting her years at The Erotic Review for a book and a film treatment. The film is being produced by Oscar-winning Cambridge graduate Rachel Weisz, who will also star as Pelling.

"It will be quite weird having her play me," she admits. "But we've talked about it and she's lovely, and hopefully it will make quite a classic piece of naughty-but-nice British cinema."

After that, she says, she'd like to concentrate on "things that have nothing to do with sex".

But that doesn't mean she's about to abandon her past.

"Every bit of the most interesting thing that's happened in my life, and all the most interesting work I've done, has come from this erotic field," says Pelling. "So I'm not going to get snooty about it.

"I think it's a real tragedy if you turn into a person who gets embarrassed about what they used to do. I don't want to be doing the flirty barmaid bit when I'm 60, but I don't think you have to leave sex behind you, either."