Only since the late 1960s have literary scholars attempted to establish an accurate and systematic literary history of women novelists. Many previous histories suffered from “Great Traditionalism,” an approach that, by limiting itself to a group of women writers termed “great,” ignored the diversity among women novelists. These histories excluded the minor novelists, who are the links in the chain that binds literary generations together, and who allow us to see the continuities in women’s writing. Given the distortions produced by this concentration on “great” writers, as well as the obviously problematic tendency of many literary scholars to apply stereotypes of femininity, it was not surprising that some literary scholars in the early 1960s evaded the important issue of women’s sexual identity entirely, focusing instead on the form and style of women’s writing. Such an approach, while insightful and very valuable, did not consider the crucial connections between women’s writing and changes in their legal and economic status.