On 11 April 1994, the Venables family left a paediatric clinic in Bath to start a new life "in a foreign country called Autism". So where's women's writing going in the 21st century? "I can't give you an opinion on this. There's a trend for novels that explore different kinds of female experience."Perhaps the concluding word should go to Clare Short, author of An Honourable Deception? New Labour, Iraq, and the Misuse of Power. Plus the Sex and the City generation are now writing more frankly about sex.""Female writers aren't confined any more," says Pringle, who has launched many an author from her London house-boat "They have a sense they can do anything. "There's also a trend to write Nancy Mitford-style nostalgia. Is this true? "Women are noticeably going into traditionally 'male' territory, from adventure stories (think of Kate Mosse's Labyrinth) to sci-fi, with Audrey Niffenegger," responds Helen Garnon-Williams, publishing director of Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

"Look, the good novelists don't have different concerns from their male colleagues," he says. "Now women are participating more fully in public life, we can write about whatever we want."Peter Florence, director of the Hay-on-Wye literary festival, is unhappy with such distinctions. The tension between those notions of identity and the desire for personal fulfilment forms much of sub-continental literature.""Oh no, I think women's writing is moving away from the domestic sphere in the 21st century," counters Moni Mohsin, new kid on the Penguin block. Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss must be one of the finest pieces of fiction published anywhere in the world this year. They're narrating and interpreting the unrivaled complexity and diversity of the Indian sub-continent in tremendously imaginative ways."What are the issues that interest women? Kapoor says: "Writing in India tends to involve the family and community to a far greater extent than in the West Here women are often defined in terms of their roles. "Arundhati Roy's novel The God of Small Things electrified the literary world. Jhumpa Lahiri did something similar with her fiction set in the Indian diaspora.

"Indian women writers have broadened and deepened the genre of literary fiction," says Penguin publisher (Canada) and Indiophile David Davidar. They're breaking the bounds of conventional novel writing, broadening cultural and linguistic boundaries."In the sub-continent, the names of Kiran (daughter of Anita) Desai, Manju Kapoor, Anita Rau Badami, Shashi Deshpande and Namita Gokhale are on many people's lips. Take Lucy Ellmann, who uses lists, capital letters and upturns the narrative form, or Clare Allan, whose unsettling novel Poppy Shakespeare is narrated by an inmate in a mental institution. "The big shift is that women's voices come from a greater cultural diversity, including a flowering of African ones," says Alexandra Pringle, editor-in-chief at Bloomsbury."There's a new sort of writing coming from women," says Pringle enthusiastically "It's bold and experimental. But she didn't lie awake at night wondering how to pay the mortgage and school fees.""But it was the phenomenal boredom of those early months of motherhood that spurred me to work seriously on my first novel," demurs Hariharan.So where is women's writing in the 21st century? There's consensus, at least, about its megastars in Britain: Zadie Smith, Monica Ali and now Ali Smith are on everyone's list Many add Sarah Waters, Julie Myerson and Helen Oyeyemi. "Women have a 'heart' rather than a 'head' approach, a decidedly female sensitivity."The real issue for women, according to Di Giovanni, is finding the time, space and quiet to write. "The fact that book advances are smaller and smaller, unless one is writing very commercial work, puts a lot of pressure on women," she says.