Inspired by research for her role in Sex Education, the actor has collected a rich picture of modern women’s sexuality through clandestine contributions

Nancy Friday’s groundbreaking anthology My Secret Garden: Women’s Sexual Fantasies was first published in the US in 1973, though Gillian Anderson only read it for the first time when she took on the role of sex therapist Dr Jean Milburn in Sex Education. “Their unfiltered and painful honesty shook me,” she says of Friday’s letters and interviews in the introduction to Want, a new collection billed as the 21st-century update. Considering the issues raised by Friday’s book – what women want, and how that relates to the gender roles imposed on us – led Anderson to question how much might have changed in the intervening half-century, and to issue an appeal for answers.

Where Friday put an anonymous advertisement in a newspaper, the Dear Gillian project’s online portal had the potential to reach a global audience, and the responses amounted to nearly 1,000 pages. Anderson’s role has been to curate these into a more manageable selection, organised thematically: “Kink”, “Strangers” and “Power and Submission” are among the more obvious headings. Sceptical readers might be asking themselves what qualifies Anderson to edit a volume on this subject, beyond having played a sex therapist, but she is quick to offer a disclaimer. “I am not an expert and have no professional qualifications in this area,” she writes. “I am an actor by trade, and will therefore not be analysing these letters, or offering explanations on womanhood or sex in general.” What she does provide is a brief overview at the beginning of each section, occasionally including a personal anecdote that stops short of revealing anything truly intimate. But she has also hidden her own anonymous fantasy somewhere in the pages as a tease to the reader. ‘Would it match people’s assumptions about me?” she wonders.