In a much-quoted episode towards the end of Jane Austen's Persuasion (1818), the heroine, Anne Elliot, discusses with Captain Harville a contentious aspect of gender and sexuality: the relative constancy in love of men and women. Captain Harville, who, like many of his Victorian successors, slips easily from the subject of women to that of ‘woman’, declares: ‘“I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman's inconstancy.”’ Anne Elliot, all too familiar with the pains of being a constant woman, replies: ‘if you please, no reference to examples in books. Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands’ (chapter 23).

Austen wrote these words at a time when women had already taken the pen into their own hands, following what Virginia Woolf described as the most important change in British history: the period of ‘extreme activity of mind … among women’ when middle-class women began to write for money.