Artful tug worried no female husky (8)
I believe the answer is:
guttural
'husky' is the definition.
(thesaurus)
'artful tug worried no female' is the wordplay.
I cannot really understand how this works, but
an anagram of 'tug' is 'gut' which is within the answer.
This explanation may well be incorrect...
Can you help me to learn more?
(Other definitions for guttural that I've seen before include "In phonetics, pronounced via throat" , "Harsh-sounding, gravelly" , "(Of sound) produced in the throat" , "Of speech, throaty and harsh-sounding like German" , "Type of speech" .)