Media: What's a girl like you doing on a magazine like this?

SEVENOAKS OBVIOUSLY doesn't produce many women quite like Rowan Pelling. Despite her cut-glass Home Counties accent and her education at a school for the daughters of missionaries, she has made it on to the hoardings of the Sevenoaks Chronicle. "Mother Defends Daughter's Erotic Review" promised newsagents last year, giving hope to deepest Tory Kent that there was to be some salacious stage show in their midst.

In fact Rowan Pelling, the daughter, is the 31-year-old editor of the Erotic Review - the literary magazine with a bent towards sex. Just 12 months ago the Erotic Review was a quarterly four-page newsletter for the Erotic Print Society - purveyors of old-fashioned filth to a select mailing list.

Then Ms Pelling took over and the Review became glossy, attracting writers such as Auberon Waugh. She made the magazine a bi-monthly which by last Christmas was selling 30,000 copies an issue. Now this month it has become a monthly and the magazine distribution company Comag promises to get it into ever more newsagents and book shops.

When Ms Pelling is asked what a nice girl like her is doing editing a magazine about sex in Soho, Sevenoaks would be proud of her reply: "I just thought there was something about the idea that was really jolly and British," she says. And she admits to being slightly pre-disposed to the job: "At school, we used to do these round robin stories where you wrote a line each, and I was very good at the sex and shopping style. I also have a vague memory of being voted the girl most likely to run a brothel. I'm sure I wouldn't have been asked to do it if it was thought I would blanch at the idea."

Ms Pelling started as PR manager at the Erotic Print Society, but was soon taking the newsletter further than before. She approached Auberon Waugh to ask him to write. Then, deciding she had a quality magazine on her hands, she phoned Waterstone's to see whether they would stock it. In a stroke of genius she offered to let them keep the profits from the copies they sold.

Since then other writers have come aboard, with The Independent's David Aaronovitch appearing in the next issue. Writers as diverse as the design guru Stephen Bayley, Toby Young, Naim Attallah, Michael Bywater, Peter Stringfellow and the former Catholic Herald editor Christine Odone have written for it.

Ms Pelling deals with the question of whether her magazine is porn in a disarmingly frank way: "No. Porn is mechanistic. People buy it for a specific reason. No one buys the Erotic Review to masturbate with." Indeed there may be the odd arousing tale, but most of the Review is just good writing.

"We thought we would say no to certain kinds of subject matter, but then in the Christmas issue we ran a piece about a mother and son by Simon Raven. It worked on many different levels - it was Ortonesque black humour from a deep vein of bad taste. But was funny enough and good enough to get away with it."

There is a sense that what really distinguishes the Erotic Review from porn is class, but whether it is classy writing or social class is probably a moot point. There is a patina of poshness on the whole enterprise. Much has been written about how many retired colonels and vicars subscribe - and it certainly does best when advertised in The Daily Telegraph.

And Ms Pelling's first job after Oxford was with the original in-house public school magazine, Private Eye. The Erotic Print Society itself was the idea of two posh art dealers - Jamie Maclean, son of Sir Fitzroy Maclean, and Tim Hobart.

The Erotic Review fits into that network of writers and chums which produces magazines on a shoestring - Pelling is the only full-time member of staff and sometimes works through the night to meet deadlines. It is much more like the Eye, The Oldie and the Modern and Literary Reviews than anything that might really upset her mum and the Sevenoaks Chronicle.