Women as a group have been denied a public voice and access to discursive authority. The ways in which women have submitted to and written against their confinement to ‘private’ discourses (for example, the epistolary mode) has been explored by feminist literary scholarship. The feminist narratologist Susan Sniader Lanser in Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voicegoes back to the mid–18th century, when both the novel and modern gender identity emerged simultaneously:

Thus, even though women were serious competitors in the economics of narrative production from the eighteenth century onwards, literary histories consistently erased their contributions. Women writers as a class were separated from the androcentric literary canon and separated from each other by making every woman writer an exception to the rule that ‘women can't write’. ‘Essentialist’ feminist discourses confront patriarchy's definition of the woman as the ‘eternal’ non–writer by constructing a femaleliterary tradition on the basis of a shared biology (which had also been the basis of the exclusion). Russ participates in this discourse in her essay collection How to Suppress Women's Writing, but also throughout her fictional work. Reconstructing women as authors and characters of fiction is a significant factor in the sexual politics particularly of Russ's explicitly feminist texts. Rewriting images of the woman as author and as character, Russ tackles the ‘anxieties of authorship’, which Part One discussed from the angle of agency, also from the perspective of sex.

From the point of view of the need to shape a female literary tradition, the implicit references to Charlotte and Emily Brontxë and to Frankenstein in Russ's short story ‘My Dear Emily’, which I discussed in Part One, take on additional significance.