The lady as novelist

For all this, the part-playful, part-hostile nineteenth-century distinction of women writers as 'lady novelists' has stayed very much alive. Consciousness of sex difference is as marked as ever it was. The distinction, however, has become hallowed as 'writers' and 'women writers', the phrase still operating to confine creative women to a pejorative subsection of the real thing, the great world of literature.

(from The Female Form: Women Writers and the Conquest of the Novel by Rosalind Miles, 1987, p. 7)