In​ chronological order, starting with her debut, Sleepwalking, which she wrote as a student at Brown and published in 1982 when she was 23, the page counts of Meg Wolitzer’s novels are: 272, 294, 352, 213, 224, 219, 307, 383, 304, 560, 464. A couple of young adult novels, published in 2011 and 2014, hit 304 and 272 respectively. Does this matter? To Wolitzer, yes. ‘I sometimes wonder if book length, intentionally or inadvertently, signals to readers a novel’s supposed importance,’ she wrote in 2012, during the dip between the politely 304-page The Uncoupling and The Interestings, a 560-page saga about friendships formed at an idyllic arts summer camp for teenagers in New England.

With some notable exceptions, women have not published many well-known doorstops since Doris Lessing’s Golden Notebook ... does the marketplace subtly and paradoxically seem to whisper in some men’s ears, ‘Sure, buddy, run on as long as you like, just sit down and type out all your ideas about America’ – what might in some extreme cases be titled ‘The Big Baggy Book of Me’? Do women reflexively edit themselves (or let themselves be edited) more severely, creating tight and shapely novels that readers and book groups will find approachable?

Her essay, ‘The Second Shelf: On the Rules of Literary Fiction for Men and Women’, tries to explain why ‘the top tier of literary fiction – where the air is rich and the view is great and where a book enters the public imagination and the current conversation – tends to feel peculiarly, disproportionately male.’ She doesn’t disguise that she too wants a spot up there. When novelists like Jeffrey Eugenides – who was in a writing workshop with Wolitzer at Brown – cover ‘perceived female subject matter’, they are taken seriously; their seriousness is signalled by the length of their novels as well as by the large letters on their covers and the gender-neutral marketing. But when women deal with the same themes, they’re relegated to a lower shelf labelled ‘women’s fiction’ – even when the books in question are not ‘a certain type of fast-reading novel, which sets its sights almost exclusively on women readers and might well find a big, ready-made audience’ but ‘literature that happens to be written by women’. An anecdote about casual sexism: at a ‘social gathering’, a man who had just learned Wolitzer was a writer asked if he’d have heard of her. When she told him she wrote about ‘marriage. Families. Sex. Desire. Parents and children’, he said his wife reads ‘that kind of book’ and called her over. ‘When I look back on that encounter, I see a lost opportunity,’ she continues. ‘When someone asks, “Would I have heard of you?” many female novelists would be tempted to answer, “In a more just world.”’

The essay is concerned only with publishing, not with actual writing, so it dares the reader to respond with an awkward, vulgar question: is Wolitzer as good as Eugenides? Regardless, reviews of her new novel, The Female Persuasion, a decently fat multi-character narrative about feminism and ‘women’s lives’ set between 2006 and 2019, are tinged with hard-won triumph. The Hillary Clinton campaign had planned to release confetti resembling shards of glass ceiling when she won – these reviews are the literary equivalent. A profile with the title ‘Why Now May (Finally) Be Meg Wolitzer’s Moment’ seemed to forget that this is a New York Times-bestselling author who has had three novels adapted for film and television, including one directed by her mentor Nora Ephron (The Female Persuasion has just been optioned, as announced by Nicole Kidman on Instagram). ‘If The Female Persuasion isn’t this era’s Great American Novel, then I don’t think there is one to be had,’ the publisher claimed in a note in my review copy. ‘The new Meg Wolitzer fuckin rules,’ the New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino tweeted. ‘The conversation I’d been hearing around the book before I even received my galley was about its resonance within our current political climate, one that is so focused on issues of women’s consent, control and intersectionality,’ Lena Dunham wrote, appearing in the New York Times one day in her surprising yet completely predictable way. ‘But when all is said and done, Wolitzer is an infinitely capable creator of human identities that are as real as the type on this page, and her love of her characters shines more brightly than any agenda.’ In the Los Angeles Times, Maris Kreizman added: ‘Here’s hoping that quotes from The Female Persuasion will be found on Tumblr blogs and needlepoints everywhere.’