A new exhibition of the work of cartoonist Posy Simmonds has just opened in the House of Illlustration in King’s Cross in London. To coincide with it, Thames & Hudson have just published a new monograph about Simmonds’s life and work, written by Paul Gravett.

Both book and exhibition provide examples of Simmonds’ ability to be both sensuous and savage at the same time. She regularly lacerates middle-class Guardianistas (which is, of course, the newspaper that has given Simmonds her most regular platform), and yet her lines are so clean, so seductive you want to live in them.

Back in 2007 I visited Simmonds at home to talk about her then latest graphic novel Tamara Drewe.

In a large, airy drawing room decorated with books, prints and paintings (none of them, as far as I can spot, her own), Posy Simmonds is sitting on a box in a corner. It's where she always sits for interviews, she tells me as I sprawl across an adjacent sofa. Her back is against the wall and she's taking up as little space as possible (and given that she is petite in build, that amounts to very, very little). After spending an hour in her company in the handsome London home she shares with her husband of more than 30 years, Richard Hollis, this seems an appropriate spot for her. In the corner, out of the way. But paying attention.

Ask anyone who has enjoyed her work over the years – in the pages of the Guardian, in the children's books she has written and most recently in her graphic novels Gemma Bovery and her latest, Tamara Drewe – it's the paying attention that's important. Having just read the latter, a tale of writers, their infidelities, the dullness of the British countryside, accidental deaths and teenage angst (with a soupcon of goat sex thrown in for seasoning), I suppose I'd arrived with the notion that Simmonds described this world too well not to be part of it. Her stiletto-sharp take on the middle-aged middle classes, the things they own, the places they stay, the harm they do to each other, has always felt something of a complicit thrill, a reporting back from the frontline of life among the Guardianista chatterati. But, this October afternoon, every time I press her to say how much of herself and her life can be found in the things she draws and writes about, she retreats back into her corner.

She may share some of the attitudes she gives to her characters ("Niceness kills," crime writer Nicholas Hardiman tells his sometime lover Tamara Drewe at one point and Simmonds more or less agrees: "Yes, it probably does."), but ask her about how she develops her ideas and she talks not about nights spent at dinner parties or holidays spent in Tuscany, but about the merits of research.

"It's like drawing a movie, " she tells me. "Where do they live? What do they drive? What do they wear? What colour is their hair?" A lot of it is guessing, she says. "Sometimes it's just knowing. I remember when I was a child I would know when there was an atmosphere." She was (and still is) a weather girl of the emotions, if you like.

There's no doubting her own middle-class upbringing (though her family sound more like Times-reading Tories) and the moneyed surroundings we are currently sitting in, but all in all Simmonds seems happier as an observer of the world she explores in her cartoons than as a participant.

Sometimes an observer is all you can be. One of the strengths of Tamara Drewe is Simmonds's take on teenage wildlife, a portrayal based on encounters on bus journeys and hanging around at bus stops, she says. It's the easiest place to eavesdrop on teenagers, she found: "They talk incredibly loudly about everything." She recalls a bus journey listening in to three girls sitting behind her discussing exactly what one of them got up to with a boy the night before. She reports the experience in a very serviceable young Lahndahn voice. "'What did he do then?' And she said, 'clothes on, zips down. He patted the dog through the letterbox'."

It's a great story, ribald and raucous. The same qualities are there in her own work, for all the Elle Decor prettiness of the presentation. Social satirists can't be too prim and proper. The notion that Simmonds, while working for Gemma Bovery, her contemporary update of Flaubert's original, required the novelist Debbie Moggach and her boyfriend to enact a sex scene for her never seemed too likely (it was only the position of the hands she was having problems with, Simmonds tells me today).

Tamara Drewe, it says on the press release, also draws on a classic novel. It is based on Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd, although that might not be entirely obvious. "I do deviate an awful lot from the plot, " she admits. He's not very fashionable these days, Hardy.

We try to work out why. "He's awfully gloomy, " Simmonds suggests. You couldn't say the same of Tamara Drewe, which wears its darkness lightly. Like Gemma Bovery, the title character is a beautiful young woman and not particularly likeable. "Very pretty women are annoying," Simmonds says. Surely she was one herself when she was younger? She's in her sixties now and still pretty. But she's not having it. "Sometimes, with all my bulbs on, like the Blackpool illuminations."

Born in 1945, Simmonds grew up in the countryside herself, in Berkshire, the middle daughter in a family of five. She was a tomboy as a girl to keep in with her older brothers, which meant falling out of trees a lot.

"I learned quite early that it wasn't your fault, being a girl. But it was like being in the wrong regiment. Girls are the catering corps. The army couldn't exist without the catering corps, God bless them. But it's not a regiment most men would want to be in."

Her father was a farmer who loved his country pursuits and had a small auction house. Her mother was, she says, "incredibly intelligent" and read voraciously, as did Simmonds herself.

She grew up on a diet of Punch magazines and girls' comics. She always loved drawing and art school seemed an inevitable destination. She arrived there in 1964. That came after a year at the Sorbonne, in Paris, when she was 17 and straight out of boarding school.

"I lived on chocolate yoghurts and oranges. There was a market around the corner where you could get damaged apples. But they were not very damaged."

After art school, she worked in temp jobs before finding herself in newspapers. Her cartoons were bought by the Sun, back in the days when its models still wore swimsuits and the paper was still vaguely leftish. That soon changed and she was happier working as an illustrator at the Guardian.

She really began to make her mark when she started a weekly strip in 1977, The Webers, that waspishly detailed the lives of a couple of archetypal Guardian readers, Wendy and George. George was a lecturer at a local polytechnic, teaching Lacan (or "bollocks" as Simmonds would have it). They disappeared a decade later, victims of the seeming immortality of Thatcherism. "They were carnivorous times, " she says now. Plus, she says, she was bored.

Simmonds opted out of newspapers and into children's books. The suicide of Hollis's 21-year-old son, Edward, after years of suffering from depression, would probably have made it hard for her to carry on working on a weekly basis, she reckons. "It was a totally bad time." But there was also the appeal of working in colour and on good paper.

For all her success as a children's author – Bouncing Buffalo was always a favourite in our house – she admits you tend to be looked down on for writing and drawing for kids. The question she was always asked was, "are you going to do something serious?"

It's a bit like being a cartoonist then, I suggest. "Yes. There's only one kind of cartoonist and that's a political cartoonist. It's always 'what else do you do?'" Well, there are the titles for a new BBC adaptation of Mrs Gaskell's Cranford due very soon. But, really, cartooning is what she does. She is very good at it. It's a little corner of the literary world she's made her own.

Originally published in The Herald on October 27, 2007

The Herald:

Posy Simmonds: A Retrospective runs at the House of Illustration until September 15, 2019. Posy Simmonds by Paul Gravett is published by Thames & Hudson, priced £18.95.

Interview originally published in The Herald on October 27, 2007