THE prize-winning author Hilary Mantel has opened up a public debate over teenage sex by saying that girls are ready to have babies at 14.

The 57-year-old novelist said society ran on a ''male timetable'' which dictated that women should have babies older.

Hilary Mantel ... mixed response. Credit:AFP

''Having sex and having babies is what young women are about, and their instincts are suppressed in the interests of society's timetable,'' she said.

''I think it is that men's lives have set the timetable. Men reach a sort of sexual peak when you are 20, a social peak when you are 40. There is this breed of women for whom society's timetable is completely wrong.''