In her foreword to the 2005 US reissue of The Best of Everything, written shortly before she died, Rona Jaffe explained how her bestselling, trendsetting novel had come about. Temporarily jobless and twentysomething in mid-1950s New York, she visited a friend who was working as secretary to the editor-in-chief at Simon & Schuster. A famous Hollywood producer happened to be in the room. He told her he was looking for a book about being young and female in New York. Jaffe decided she was the person to write it.

She interviewed 50 women as research: "Back then," she writes, "people didn't talk about not being a virgin. They didn't talk about going out with married men. They didn't talk about abortion. They didn't talk about sexual harassment, which had no name in those days. But after interviewing these women, I realised that all these issues were part of their lives too." All these issues were what made the novel a racy revelation: it was frank about women's newfound sexual freedom; it was honest about their ambitions; it was glitzy and glamorous.

A million or so copies later, The Best of Everything gave rise to a sub-genre of novels by American women writers. Mary McCarthy's The Group, published in 1963, with its portraits of clever Vassar girls just unleashed on the world, was almost certainly inspired by it. Sylvia Plath's cult novel The Bell Jar, which appeared in the same year, also has echoes of Jaffe's novel. Another generation passed, and HBO brought out Sex and the City. The stories haven't changed much, but in describing what girls who live in tiny Manhattan apartments really want, Jaffe got there first.

The Best of Everything focuses on a group of women recently arrived in New York City. Caroline, a college graduate who is trying to put a broken engagement behind her, has ambitions beyond the typing pool at Fabian Publications; she wants to become an editor. April, a country girl, buys clothes on credit and remakes herself into a fashionable New Yorker in her search for love and marriage. Mary Agnes is saving all her money for the white wedding of her dreams. Gregg, an aspiring actress, has fallen for an older, complex producer of plays who, appropriately enough, goes by the name of David Wilder Savage. And Barbara, 21 and divorced, works for a beauty magazine to support her baby daughter.

Penguin Classics reissued the book after Mad Men's Don Draper was shown reading a copy. Like Mad Men, the novel revels in the promise and the glitter of New York. Its characters drink Scotch in dark bars, ride around in taxis and smoke plenty of cigarettes. There are sparkling passages of writing that track the minute-by-minute ups and downs of the characters' confidence and insecurities. A perfect pair of gloves, a rough encounter on the subway, a longed-for comment from an office superior: each trivial event can turn the world upside down for these women as they try to make their mark.

On the surface, everyone is having a ball, but the deeper you go the less fun things seem. In its outcomes for its protagonists  there are a few happy endings and some miserable ones too  the novel seems to want to show that freedom isn't quite as wonderful as it looks. The only secure resolution for its female characters is marriage. Revealingly, Jaffe says in her foreword: "To this day women come up to me and say that the book changed their lives. I was a little surprised, because I had thought The Best of Everything was a cautionary tale." Perhaps it was.

Eleanor Birne's When Will I Sleep Through the Night? is published by Profile.

Some things never change, and the way of life of the young woman trying to make it on her own in a big city is, perhaps, one of them. In 1991, I came to London to work as a trainee on a Sunday newspaper. It was a peculiarly febrile time. My job was tough, the city was tough, and I had alarmingly little money on which to live. But it was also exciting. Anything could have happened, and who cared if I had to live on thin air! The two feelings  the loneliness, and the thrill of being alone  were conjoined; I could no more have separated them than I could have bought a flat in Chelsea. And so my mood seemed to be always in a state of flux: one minute, I was on top of the world; the very pavements could provoke a smile. The next, I would feel as low as I ever had: overwhelmed, and desperate for home.

I'm grown-up now, and more placid. But this is not to say that I have lost my taste for novels that dramatise this experience. Far from it. I am a greedy veteran of the dusty paperback in which the heroine hangs her underwear over a radiator to dry while pondering whether she should sleep with her boss (inevitably, she does, with the result that she will now have to wear waterproof mascara to the office). And until a few weeks ago, I was certain that the original and best of these novels would always be Mary McCarthy's The Group, which follows the lives of eight women graduates as they try to make it in New York. Turns out, though, that I was wrong. Five years before The Group was published in 1963, another clever young woman wrote a novel about the struggle of her peers to combine work and the search for love, and it, too, was both a scandal and a roaring success. "This is a story," said the Cleveland Press, "that should be read by girls with dramatic ideas about New York, parents with qualms about their daughters' ideas, and men with baffling questions about girls' minds."

The novel in question is The Best of Everything by Rona Jaffe, which is now enjoying a new life beyond the secondhand book stores thanks to the cult TV show Mad Men. In season one, the show's main character, the advertising genius Don Draper, was seen reading The Best of Everything in bed  the better to learn about young American women and their hearts' desires  with the result that, soon after, in the US, Penguin republished the book. Now Penguin UK is following suit, complete with a jacket quote by Julie Burchill: "It harks back to a saner time, when choosing progress and modernity was as straightforward as ordering dinner  'Two scotches with water on the side, and two steaks'."

Actually, this is not quite the case (though I'll give Burchill this: its characters eat as much steak as they can possibly afford, and drink as much scotch as they are physically able). The women in The Best of Everything, who work at a New York publishing house, struggle to choose a new way of living. Caroline, a graduate who is determined to escape the typing pool and become an editor, cannot forget the man to whom she was once engaged, with painful consequences; April, who has moved to the city from the midwest, sleeps with her boyfriend only to find that she is now considered "easy"; Gregg, an aspiring actress, turns into what we would call a stalker when she is dumped by a man whose past is too "modern" even for her; and Barbara, a divorced single mother, spends her days wondering if there is anyone alive who will take on another man's child. These are women who fear progress and modernity even as a part of them longs for it; the pressure to conform is simply too entrenched, the spectre of spinsterdom, at a time when such a status could be achieved before one had even turned 25, too shaming. In the 50s, remember, a failure to marry was seen as a quasi-perversion.

The emotional lives of these women are beautifully drawn, and Jaffe makes piercing use of the contrast between the surface allure of New York (the girls' office is at the Rockefeller Centre, then considered the epicentre of glamour) and the drab rooms they share; studio couches against the wall, nothing but a pint of milk and some cheap booze in the refrigerator. For my own part, I wonder now if Matthew Weiner, Mad Men's creator, didn't read Jaffe's novel before he set to work. Like his scripts, the novel is replete with five o'clock Martinis in sepulchral bars, but you feel, too, the steady thrum of its characters' most private anxieties: about money, about contraception, about promotion. Some of Jaffe's twists were considered shocking in 1958 (a backstreet abortion, a character who is secretly gay). But others feel strikingly timeless. How to deal with the sexist dolt who is your boss? When he puts his hand drunkenly on your thigh, do you knee him the groin, or smile beatifically and pray for a raise?

In its first incarnation, The Best of Everything was published by Simon & Schuster, where it was edited by the legendary Robert Gottlieb. (Gottlieb went on to publish, among many other books, Catch-22; he also edited the New Yorker.) But it began its life thanks to Rona Jaffe's college pal, Phyllis Levy, who worked as a secretary at S&S, and who mentioned to Jerry Wald, a visiting movie producer who had come in scouting for properties to option, that Jaffe was writing a novel. "Well, I'm looking for a modern-day Kitty Foyle," he told Levy. "A book about working girls in New York." (Kitty Foyle is a 1939 novel by Christopher Morley, later made into a film starring Ginger Rogers.) Jaffe, who was then working as an editor at Fawcett Publications  a company not unlike the Fabian Publications of her book  duly read Kitty Foyle. "I thought it was dumb," she wrote shortly before her death in 2005. "I said to myself: he doesn't know anything about women. I know about women." Just to be sure, though, she interviewed 50, quizzing them over "all the things nobody spoke about in polite company". It seemed she was right: her own experiences were not unique. "I thought that if I could help one young woman sitting in her tiny apartment thinking she was all alone and a bad girl, then the book would be worthwhile." Gottlieb told her to "look back in horror and write"  and she was off.

"Everyone decided this was a big commercial possibility," Gottlieb tells me, on the telephone from New York. "There was a history there, because The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit [a 1955 novel by Sloan Wilson about the frustrations of executive life, later made into a film starring Gregory Peck] had already been a success. So we threw ourselves into it. We were reading it as she was writing it." Jaffe began to think that she might have a hit on her hands when the girls in the S&S typing pool began calling her, begging to know what was going to happen next. "Rona wasn't struggling, like her characters," says Gottlieb. "She was from a rich family. But she was very observant, in a rather cruel way, and she was smart. It isn't a literary book. It's more in the tradition of Peyton Place. But you're right: it captures what it's like for young women, getting out of home, coming to a city, being on your own. The surfaces might have changed, but there are women going through this same thing right now."

Jaffe went on to write more than a dozen novels, a collection of stories called Mr Right is Dead, and to establish a foundation in support of women writers; meanwhile, The Best of Everything duly became a movie. I can recommend this film for its costumes, and for Joan Crawford's performance as Miss Farrow, the girls' boss, who leaves the firm, only to return a few months later, having discovered that marriage and a quiet life on the west coast are not for her. But  it is Jaffe's novel to which I send you now. It is, I think, the perfect summer read: juicy, involving and classy. Even as you smile at the thought that smoking was once considered a skill, and white cotton gloves a wardrobe basic, it will also make you feel nostalgic for your own past, for those feverish days when fear and elation were pretty much the same thing.