Jane Austen is the only woman who has a well established place in the traditional canon (the list of works used to define 'classic literature') before Charlotte and Emily Brontë, George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell turn up in the middle of the 19th century. But the canon is an "edited highlights" version of literary history. And until the middle of the 20th century, it was men doing the editing because it was nearly always men who wrote book reviews and literary histories.

In the late 18th and early 19th century, most work by female authors wasn't seen by male critics as important enough to earn their help in preserving it for the future, so both books and reputations were lost to time. But recent historical research has shown that lots of women were writing when Jane Austen was alive, and many were well known by the reading public. And these women were, in fact, following in the footsteps of generations of female authors: the first women to work as professional writers had done so well over a century before Jane Austen invented Elizabeth and Darcy.

Despite this well established tradition, all female authors in Jane Austen's time faced a number of obstacles. The opinion of society was that unless they were rich enough to have uninterrupted leisure time, women should treat writing as just a hobby and concentrate on their domestic duties as a wife, mother, daughter or sister. Another difficulty was the risk of spoiling a good reputation. Through the 18th century lots of women had joined "Grub Street" – a term used to describe the world of London-based hacks who scraped a living by writing for low-grade publishers – and therefore increased the risk that women with literary ambitions would be judged in the same way as the female authors who churned out "bawdy romances" or wrote for the scandal sheets.

"Special creatures"

A woman's reputation was so important that female authors were judged by both critics and the public as much on how respectable they were as what they wrote. Whether or not they were writers, women were expected to live a modest and reserved life. Relatively new ideas about gender difference meant that women were now seen as "special creatures' whose natural area of expertise was the home, the emotions and guiding moral conduct. Women who flexed their intellectual muscles by writing books that dealt with ideas or political themes rather than charming heroines and romantic intrigue were seen as a dangerous threat to the status quo.

Like many middle-class women, Jane Austen chose to balance her love of writing and the need to stick to moral codes by remaining anonymous throughout her career as an author – it was only just after she died that her name was made public. She also stayed in line with convention by writing about "safe" subjects. Her stories focused on domestic and emotional matters: family, love and marriage, and her plots generally centred on young female characters learning (eventually) how to be better people. But although Jane Austen used her talent in an extremely modest manner by modern standards, the point is that she ignored the prejudices against female authors and started to write. As an unmarried woman, she particularly enjoyed the chance to earn her own money – with careers closed to them, women in her position normally had to rely on male relatives for financial support.

Paving the way

Although Jane Austen wrote in the way that society expected her to, her work, which was admired for its wit and intelligence, greatly improved the reputation of female authors. Her realistic characters and social commentary also helped lay the foundations for the modern novel. And although they are far from feminists, her heroines point towards the future by being lively and independent. They also, unlike many female characters in fiction at the time, correct errors of judgement through their own experience rather than being taught to do so by a man – in Pride And Prejudice, Darcy has as much to learn from Elizabeth as she does from him.

Of the many female authors who were working during the same period as Jane Austen, she herself read and admired the work of Fanny Burney, Maria Edgeworth, Charlotte Smith, Jane West, Charlotte Lennox and Anne Radcliffe; Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter, Mary Shelley, are also important names.

The website of Chawton House, a research library and study centre that focuses on women's writing in English from 1600 to 1830, holds detailed information on female authors from Jane Austen's period. Visit www.chawton.org