IN MY LATE TEENS, MORE than a decade ago, I read haphazardly through the classics, and discovered some favourite books: Albert Camus’ The Plague, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Between the Acts, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities, Doris Lessing’s Martha Quest,Guy de Maupassant’s Bel Ami.

In my naivety, I hardly noticed whether the authors or protagonists were men or women; I regarded these books as examinations of something that I thought of vaguely as the human condition. It was only gradually that I understood that there was something called “women’s writing” – that books by women were filed under the gender of their authors.

“Women’s writing” was once a reasonable shorthand, because the vast majority of writers were men, and women writers were a notable anomaly. Literature was essentially, numerically, male. The numbers have changed, but our labels and assumptions have not entirely. Hordes of women now graduate with arts degrees every year. Many aspire to write. According to research by Book Marketing Limited, women buy and read more fiction than men: 44 per cent of men compared to 77 per cent of women. Using the unscientific method of browsing through the contemporary fiction shelves of several bookshops, it seems that there are as many women novelists as men, as many female protagonists as male.

The number of women winning literary prizes has increased in recent years. In the 106-year history of the Nobel Prize for Literature only ten women have been crowned laureate; four of them in the past 15 years. Between 1948 and 1980 there were only five female Pulitzer-prizewinners; between 1980 and the present-day, there have been ten. Since the inception of the Booker Prize, nearly three decades ago, there have been 12 women winners. Until 2001, the Costa (formerly Whitbread) Book of the Year had gone only once in 21 years to a woman; four out of the last five winners have been female.

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Despite this evidence that there are serious women writers winning important literary awards, a recent survey by Lisa Jardine and Annie Watkins, of Queen Mary, London University, suggests that women are still not the literary equal of men as far as general reading habits are concerned.

While women read books by both genders, Jardine and Watkins explain, men simply don’t read books by women. “Fiction by women remains ‘special interest’, with men finding it ‘much more difficult to “like” or “admire” a novel authored by a woman’ – for them ‘great’ writing was male writing.”

Jon Howells, of Waterstone’s, supported their conclusions: “Men . . . think that what women write doesn’t appeal to them.”

The broadcaster Muriel Gray, one of the judges for this year’s Orange Prize, suggested recently that the reason women authors fail to appeal across the genders is because that they focus on “small-scale domestic themes such as motherhood, boyfriend troubles and tiny family dramas”. We might equally say that Anna Karenina is a veritable catalogue of boyfriend troubles, that Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, and Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin’s The Golovlyov Family all describe “tiny family dramas”.

Gray’s definition of motherhood as a “small-scale domestic theme” is particularly striking. Motherhood is a profoundly significant experience, not merely for millions of mothers, but for the whole species. Without mothers we are a dying race – no more great authors, no more prize committees. If an Orange Prize judge believes that motherhood is a trivial subject, things look bad for women.

One option for women who want to appeal across the sexes is gender disguise. If Jardine and Watkins et al are right, this doesn’t lose you any women readers but might win over a few men. Annie Proulx, one of the most successful authors of recent years, is a skilled male impersonator, having created the brilliantly troubled Quoyle in The Shipping News, Loyal in Postcards, and the oppressed cowboys of Brokeback Mountain. Iris Murdoch was studiously androgynous in fiction; her Booker-prizewinner The Sea, the Seastaged the dilemmas of the melancholy Charles Arrowby. The most recent Man Booker winner, Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, is anchored in the story of a male judge.

This sort of exile and cunning is hardly ideal. It becomes boring to have to think about whether the stories you want to tell will be dismissed as “women's interest”.

A sense of frustration courses through the works of the underrated author Meg Wolitzer, whose books appear with splashy chick-lit covers, although she is one of the finest writers in America today. In The Wife, Wolitzer portrays a woman who denies herself a career as a novelist and becomes her husband's ghostwriter. She understands the unpalatable truths of literary reception, and opts out: “Everyone is still fascinated by the inner lives of men. Women are fascinated. Men win, hands down.”

It is hard to write freely, to write with real ambition, when you are stymied by such concerns, when you write knowing that half the race will be reluctant to read you, simply because of your sex. Yet much has changed in recent years; the circumstances for women who write are better than before. Perhaps it won’t be too long before the epithet “women writers” can be discarded altogether, and there will just be “writers”, expressing the manifold complexity of life on earth.

Click here to read a review of Joanna Kavenna's debut novel Inglorious

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