John Duncombe (1729-1786) published his "canon-forming" celebration of British women writers as The Feminiad in 1754, though the title was revised as The Feminead in the second, 1757 edition.

The academic discipline of women's writing is a discrete area of literary studies which is based on the notion that the experience of women, historically, has been shaped by their sex, and so women writers by definition are a group worthy of separate study: "Their texts emerge from and intervene in conditions usually very different from those which produced most writing by men." It is not a question of the subject matter or political stance of a particular author, but of her sex, i.e. her position as a woman within the literary world.