I have had the enormous pleasure of talking about the hidden histories of women’s writing many times this year, at bookshops, libraries and festivals. As I prepared, I thought again about how female writers of the past had to overcome social disapproval to write, publish or promote their work. Marketing your book was seen as unladylike and even scandalous – a little (delicate shudder) like selling yourself. None of this censure attached to male literary lions hawking their wares, but the arena of art was one in which the women were supposed to stand still and look winsome and inspiring. They were muse, never artist.

Lizzie Siddall, painted as Ophelia by John Everett Millais, is a woman I always turn to to illustrate this point. She wrote and she painted. Despite not having the benefit of the art school education the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood were privileged enough to absorb and then rail against, she was good enough that John Ruskin — pre-eminent art critic of the Victorian age — offered to buy all her artworks so she could support her practice. But although she is famous, today we know her as this: a mute and beautiful muse, strewing her flowers and drowning winsomely. She caught a terrible cold modelling for it, too, when the lamps warming the bath she was posing in went out and she was too polite to interrupt the master at work to tell him that her teeth were chattering.

Women found ways round this. They published anonymously, like Jane Austen who published during her lifetime only as ‘A Lady’. (Virginia Woolf says, in A Room of One’s Own: “I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”) They published under male pseudonyms like the Brontës and George Eliot. They published under gender neutral initials – I understand J K Rowling was told boys wouldn’t read her if she published as Joanne. They could be ‘published by others’ – so much less unseemly – like Anne Bradstreet who claimed her brother-in-law swiped her book, sailed from Massachusetts back to London with it and printed it in 1650 without her knowledge. (Her thirteen uses of the word ‘fame’ in the first three poems suggest she was perhaps a more active participant in the process that it was acceptable for her to admit, mind.)

A suitably pious and Puritan Victorian imagining of Anne Bradstreet. Would this woman be so bold as to publish a book? Heaven forbid!

Every time I cringe talking about my books on social media, or feel I’m underqualified to speak on the subjects on which I do (which is many times – and I am literally a book publicist) I remind myself that I am the heir to these centuries of pursed-lipped whiskery disapproval. Every awkwardly dismissed compliment, every self-deprecating aside is a symptom of that hangover. It’s plaited into our society and our own fibres at so deep a level that most women have never asked for a payrise. Nobody likes a swanker, but it’s ok to own your achievements.

I have a collection of things men have said about women writers that I include in my talks. “Intense thought spoils a lady’s features”, opined eighteenth century critic William Rose. Don’t furrow your pretty brows girls! Norman Mailer wrote in Advertisements for Myself that “a good novelist can do without everything but the remnant of his balls”, prompting Cynthia Ozick to ask him in 1971: “I’ve been wondering, Mr. Mailer, when you dip your balls in ink, what color ink is it?” Watch her glorious take down here. In 2011, V S Naipaul claimed no women writer was his equal and talked about ‘feminine tosh’ (definitely the title of my imaginary garage band’s first EP.) But in my recent research I found a new favourite. In 1855, Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of The Scarlet Letter, wrote to his publisher that America was now dominated by “a damned mob of scribbling women.” And that’s such a doozy, I think I want merch. Would wear that shirt in a heartbeat.

To read work by a damned mob of scribbling women, including many who were unpublished or unfeted during their lifetimes or quickly forgotten afterwards, pick up a copy of She is Fierce or She Will Soar. I have a talk I love giving on the hidden histories of women writers that includes mention of Murasaki Shikibu, Jane Austen, Margaret Cavendish, Mary Leapor, James Tiptree Jr, Lizzie Siddal, Anne Bradstreet and lots more, so do get in touch if you’re planning an event for which this would work.