as Brian Froud would describe them, between flattened spaceships, sliver-world castles and very sexy people carrying ornate swords.

I collect books of fantasy art. Why? Because I adore ‘story pictures’. And, despite being well and truly ‘grown up’, I confess to a frustrated appetite for narrative illustration.

Oh, I know there are two sides to this argument. The winners – and they have won for many years – prefer their novels naked. Adult readers should imagine their own pictures! But don’t the fine drawings of Iain McIntosh, in Alexander McCall Smith’s books prove that pictures can lend ‘mood’?

Why have we become so afraid of ‘colouring in’? Why do we insult our ‘illuminators’, limiting their exquisite imagery to covers, which, by necessity, are overlaid with giant words?

Imagine, for a moment, doing it my way. Imagine novels holding, secret in their hearts, precious pictures. What would be your selection process, as you wait for your train or plane, curling your fingers around escapist word-worlds? Do you read the back cover? Scan the first page? Or childishly, thirstily hunt out the magical colour plates?

Ah ha! I can see you!

And I can hear editors shouting, ‘COST!’ 

Easy answer – I’ll pay more. Willingly. There might, however, be a slight problem with home storage, because I could never sell a beautifully illustrated novel for 10p at a car boot sale.

Recently, flirting a £20 gift voucher around Scarborough’s Waterstones, I explained my illustrative frustration to a very helpful assistant, Sean, who walked me to a shelf of graphic novels, including Terry Pratchet’s, ‘The Discworld’. But the swift pic of the comic strip is a whole ride; what I was lusting after were fabulous, exquisite portals.

With my voucher, I bought a whole book of portals! ‘Fantasy Art Now’. Wow! (Ed. Martin McKenna, ILEX)

Illustrations, I believe, provide interfaces with otherworlds, drawing us through the paper into our own movie screens. Sharply drawn faces stare at us. They blink. And we’re off, flying impossible spacecrafts towards purple planets, wielding those rubied swords against monsters.

Another day, another page, and we are gazing at cottage. Spidery words take us to the windows. We peep through....

Good isn’t it?

If I’m still a book baby, I’m not sorry. What more enchanting treasure than an old picture hardback, with ‘This book belongs to’ filled in by a child a century ago? I’ve got two pressed under my mattress.

Beside my bed sit ugly ‘Korrigans’. They’re French. To glimpse these naughty creatures, explore the Féerie books of Jean-Baptiste Monge and Erlé Ferronnière. Sadly, the wonderful drawings are only accompanied with ‘information’. Why aren’t they stitched together by a great storyteller? Why, in this daft world, are these two complementary skills so rarely intertwined, except for children’s publications?

It isn’t just the literary world which has forced illustrators into childrens’ corners. The Art world has denied its own. Certainly, that seemed to be the case a few years ago, when I was studying Art and Design. Before I tell you a sad story, I admit, with some frustration, that I am not blessed with a graphic hand!

Our group was set a weaving assignment. Challenged to camouflage scrappy woven pieces into an image, most students extended the pattern in paint; but lo!, my strings and ribbons became the ropes of an air balloon, and my earthy wool bits a swathe of moorland.

It was bad. But not that bad.

The tutor, (bitch, young enough to be my daughter) used her index finger and thumb to flick my offering across the desk. ‘WHAT,’ she demanded, ‘is THAT?’  She sighed. ‘Studying Art is not about painting pictures.’

I froze. So did my fellow students. We did ‘abstract’ to abstraction, until we were forced to ‘get it’. Yet there could have been ten talented picture painters in that group.

How many glamorous pens and brushes have been thrown in bins like dead sparklers? Can’t we please woo our illustrators back to adult storyland? Don’t we want to see the wonderful pictures that have never been painted?

Let’s write a tale about a big library. One day the librarian leaves an upper window open, and in flies a fairy. She has a paper dress, wings woven out of letters and a wand which looks like an i. Her shoes are covered in magic paint, and, as she tiptoes along the bookshelves, all the novels get splashed. A flourish of the i wand and the books suddenly bulge. Row after row, the fairy paints stories, leaving a tiny space in every blue horizon for the readers to climb through. 

By morning the library, which was already beautiful, is glowing with white light. Every time anyone opens a book, the light breaks into rainbows, which swirl, then settle between the pages.

And some of us live happily ever after.

[Annabel Dore is the author of The Great North Road]

A few weeks ago, on a Sunday afternoon, I was sitting in a garden in Brittany with some French lady friends, all aged over sixty, including a slightly tipsy madame nearing her century. The wine was crisp and sparkling, the conversation as mucky and murky as the water in my old butt. Not that I realised, to begin with. My education had not equipped me with those French words which might appear in a translation of Lady Chatterley; but a bit of finger waggling, along with such choking hilarity that garden chairs began toppling, and I caught on. What did I do? Join in, of course!

My relationship with the Breton ladies changed forever. Reassured that this English lady actually laughs at ‘normal’ stuff, they have now abandoned all propriety and I am included in their ‘real’ conversational world – one which I could never write.

I wonder why.

Last week, back in Yorkshire, I invited ‘the girls’ – such lovely English roses – around for a curry. I have to tell you that a transcript of the conversation would be unprintable. Suffice to say that when one lady stood up and made an announcement about a singular feature of her weight gain, we all laughed so much that there was a mad dash for my (thank God I’ve got two) toilets. Dare I write, at this point, in praise of Tena pads? No, probably not. But, you see, that’s what we’re like. That’s the truth of us. Women, collectively, are often rather crude.

Oh, I wish I could tell you what she said, but I can’t. No, I just can’t. I’m probably wrongly convinced that all decent men and at least half of the women reading this would be utterly disgusted.

In literary terms, looking at that beautiful mirrored SCREEN which hides the real ‘gas and giggle’, I’m not quite sure why it’s still there. The POLITICAL SCREEN is a flimsy thing with holes in it, and I’m sure there’s never been a HORROR SCREEN at all. Books have always permitted us to gaze openly across landscapes of corruption, murder and depravity; even manhoods and maindenhoods get a fair gallop across the plains; but I’ve never read any women’s conversations as earthy as those I’ve begun noting in my diary.

In her researched theatre texts, ‘The Good Body’ and ‘The Vagina Monologues’, Eve Ensler courageously reveals some stark truths guaranteed to provoke the empathetic binary of tragic laughter. Perhaps Ensler’s intimate glimpses are ‘permitted’ as non-gratuitous because, as she momentarily eases back the SCREEN, she reveals, not just normal flesh, but tragic scar tissue.

Under my friends’ tightening denim, however, is a whole map of non-tragic chafes, warts and deformities which do not require dramatic surgery. A smear of greasy laughter, a slurp of medicinal brandy and a pack of drip pads – we cope.

So let’s look into the mirrors on our SCREEN and ask:

If we don’t write our own truth, did Austen?

How much historical woman language and humour has been lost?

Should we cherish and protect our SCREEN, or tip it over?

Are we ashamed to write and read the way women really talk?

Our private language is honest and painfully funny as the spot on my bum. I wonder if the editor will change that to ‘the corn on my toe’.  Like my overblown rose friend, I’ve put on so much weight that I probably couldn’t see a corn either, but if I get to that mirrored SCREEN, and turn around, and twist a bit…

[The Great North Road by Annabel Dore is out now in paperback]