The over-seventies sit and knit, they rock in their chairs; they also have sex, plot murder and contemplate life in the same way as people who are decades younger.

Jane Campbell’s debut book, Cat Brushing, has got the literary world talking, mainly because her aged characters lead bigger lives than people expect.

“I believe in not allowing society to define you as having had your life. In Britain in particular, during lockdown I noticed that every time anybody talked about an older woman it was in the context of dementia, ill health, care homes, eating up state resources…..There was absolutely no sense at all that these elderly women might have any kind of knowledge or wisdom or comfort or any kind of anything to offer anyone – they were just sort of passive,” she said.

“In most literature, and this is why I think people noticed my stories, there may be an elderly person but they’re somebody's grandmother or somebody's nanny or somebody's mother and they don't have their own stories. And so my goal was to give these old women their own stories.”

Cat Brushing is a collection of 13 “intimate vignettes” about “the psychological and emotional lives of old women”.

The book’s publisher, Grove Atlantic, describes the tales, which it says “will shock and comfort in equal measure”.

“Susan finds she is attracted to her beautiful young carer, Miffy, and embarks on an intense emotional relationship with her. Nell reflects on her past and a young girl in distress she encountered on her honeymoon. Linda perversely seeks out her former lover, Malik, on the banks of the Victoria Falls, despite having left him years ago to return to her settled marriage. Daisy finds herself at the funeral of her former husband.

“The narrator of Lockdown Fantasm enjoys the cool fingers of her government-authorised ‘fantasm’ on Week 193 of the ‘long lockdown’. Martha, mourning her dog whom she believes has been killed by the care home staff, works out how to manage a robot designed to monitor her behaviour, and to get her revenge. The narrator of Cat Brushing communes with her elegant, soft Siamese cat, reflecting on the sexual pleasures of her past.”

The San Francisco Chronicle calls it “dirty, doughty” and “wickedly funny”; The New York Times “fresh, assured and fun”. The Toronto Star describes it as “an exploration of libido, passions and how older women maintain their sense of self as they fight against stereotypes”. Further accolades come from People Magazine, Oprah Daily, Publishers Weekly, The Independent and many others.

Ms Campbell, 81, is mainly pleased to finally be paid for her efforts.

“I've always written. Every now and again, I sporadically sent stuff off to various places but nothing was ever published.”

People assumed she thought it “wonderful” to see her work in print when in reality, “it wasn’t that special”.

“What really pleased me was that I was able to start writing with the expectation of being paid for it … but [it was mainly] that I changed my profession, and that was really nice. It's weird. I do not know why I was not more impressed.”

It took about two years to write Cat Brushing. It started with a single story that Ms Campbell submitted to the London Review of Books in 2017 because she was a big fan of the British literary magazine.

“They don’t publish fiction, they publish book reviews and things like that but after I'd written it in four days, upstairs in [my son] Nick’s kitchen, I just thought, ‘This is a hell of a good story’.

“And so I sent it and they did publish it. And I was introduced to a woman who wanted to act as my agent and she encouraged me to write more short stories about old women. And then I did and then they got published and that's how it began.”

The stories are entirely made up. In creating them, Ms Campbell drew on her work as a group analyst during her 35-year career in psychoanalysis that she embarked on after a postgraduate degree in applied social science.

A psychiatric placement was required as part of her studies – she discovered she enjoyed the work much in the same way she now enjoys writing.

“I always placed the stories in settings that I knew very well and described them quite well and so there's a terrible risk people will think they’re autobiographical but they really are completely fictional [although] they do reflect my experience of life.

“They are all stories; they're all human stories. It's all people talking about their lives or their emotions or their conflict or their unhappiness or their achievements. For me, the language changes but not the subject matter.”

She attributes much of the fantastic response she has had to her publishers, particularly Elisabeth Schmitz of Grove Atlantic in New York.

“She's a very experienced, very sophisticated, very wonderful woman who has, I think, been able to publicise the book in a way that attracts the attention of people,” Ms Campbell said.

“A lot of the publicity focused on sex [but] the only reason that anyone takes any notice of it is that I have given women of a certain age – they're probably all over 70, some in their eighties – and I've given them the same preoccupation that an average 40 to 50-year-old would have: they want to have relationships, they sometimes think about sex, they try to understand their lives and they seek out lost relationships; they reflect on what they've learnt in their lives and wonder what it means. It’s just that nobody ever thinks of old women as having these thoughts. So I suppose what I've done is normalised what I regard as basic human emotions and just given them to old people.”

Her attention is now on a novel, which is due out in the spring of 2024.

“In some ways, that's enormously exciting but in some ways it's extremely demanding. I’m quite pleased with it, I like it, but I’m trying to get it as good as it can be. And that’s quite a lot of work.”

Cat Brushing is available at Bermuda Book Store and on Amazon. Jane Campbell will read and sign copies of her book on Saturday at BMDS from 1pm until 3pm. To RSVP: jenn@jenno.ca