The World Is Full of Married Men was published by W.H. Allen in 1968, and its publication was an event: the novel was immediately banned in Australia and South Africa, attacked by critics as pornographic, and devoured by readers who recognized in it a frank depiction of sexual realities that mainstream fiction refused to acknowledge.
The novel follows David Cooper, a successful advertising executive conducting an affair with a younger woman while his wife remains oblivious — or pretends to remain oblivious. Collins’s innovation was to show both sides of the triangle with equal sympathy and equal honesty: the man’s sense of entitlement, the mistress’s calculation and vulnerability, and the wife’s growing awareness and eventual rebellion. The “world” of the title is one in which married men cheat routinely and get away with it because society’s rules are written by and for them.
Collins wrote from the inside — she was the sister of actress Joan Collins and moved in the worlds of entertainment, wealth, and power that her novels depicted. Her frankness about female sexuality (women in her novels have desires and pursue them, rather than merely responding to male initiative) was genuinely revolutionary in 1968, predating the feminist sexual revolution by several years.
Collecting The World Is Full of Married Men
First edition (W.H. Allen, London, 1968): Cloth binding, dust jacket. Collins’s first novel.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $80–$250
- Without jacket: $15–$40
- First US edition (Simon & Schuster, 1969): $30–$80