‘Writing by women’ potentially encompasses women writing, women writers and women's writing, that is, the social and cultural conditions regulating women's production of texts (and the further we go back in history the more significant this is); the reception – and, more recently, marketing – of women as writers; and the thematic and aesthetic specificities (whatever may exist of these) of texts that are designated, or designate themselves, as women's writing. While it is difficult to separate completely the biographical and sociological from the thematic, particularly where women writers are concerned, this chapter focuses largely on textual matters, as well as interrogating critical discourse and approaches to writing by women.

Women are amply represented in post-Wende (after the fall of the Berlin Wall) German-language literature, especially in a younger generation of writers; the spurious designation literarisches Fräuleinwunder (literary girl-miracle) – intended to reflect the prominence of these younger writers – and the marketing of Judith Hermann in particular demonstrate, however, that the promotion and popular reception of women authors has not necessarily afforded them equal treatment. Recent academic volumes also do not start from an assumption of equality achieved: Chris Weedon and Jo Catling's survey volumes have taken a non-essentialist, but still separatist approach in order to correct an imbalance which may now lie more in criticism of literature than in its production.