Who do you fantasise about when the light are off, when you think about sex, what do you really really want? When we talk about sex, we talk about womanhood and motherhood, infidelity and exploitation, consent and respect, fairness and egalitarianism, love and hate, pleasure and pain.

Sexual fantasies of women from around the world, are all extraordinary, full of desire, fear, intimacy, shame, satisfaction and ultimately liberation.  From dreaming about someone off-limits to conjuring a scene with multiple partners, from sex that is gentle and tender to passionate and playful, from women who have never had sex to women who have had more sex than they can remember, these fantasies provide an insight into the most secret part of our minds.

Anderson’s role as Jean Milburn on the Netflix series Sex Education that spurred the creation of this collection and encouraged the women who sent in their fantasies to confide in her. The book began when Anderson read Nancy Friday’s My Secret Garden – for the first time- to prepare for the job. This collection of women’s fantasies, first published in 1973, remains a key text in second wave feminism. Anderson put out a call for 21^st century women from around the world to send in their sexual desires and dreams and they responded in their hundreds: resulting in WANT.

Sex is – as it has always ever been-big business. WE seem to be in a mini-boom of sex-positive books written by women, aimed at women, that reveals women attempting to redefine the boundaries of permission within what is still the patriarchy. Miranda’s novel All Fours, published this year, about a middle-aged woman’s erotic reclamation, Molly Roden Winter’s memoir of her open marriage, More, and Marianne Power’s Love Me! One Woman’s search for a Different Happy Ever After.

We dream that our relationships to our bodies might be simple, that women might have free and simple access to what we truly want when it come to our physical selves and what we do with them.

Many women in Want frame their fantasies in a way which recalls  the historical constraints.

Every human sexual desire is finally mysterious, unknowable, but there is no doubt  that across the ages women’s desire has been perceived as dangerous. Sexual desire,  and by implication women’s desire for anything – autonomy, political power, economic freedom – can be presented as a threat. With women’s right at risk all around the world now is not the time for complacency, but an opportunity to ensure that women’s sexual confidence and freedom is part of a larger whole. Sex makes the impossible possible.

Want: Submitted by Anonymous collected by Gillian Anderson Bloomsbury £18.99, 369 pages.