Karyl’s Reviews > Jane Austen's Bookshelf: A Rare Book Collector's Quest to Find the Women Writers Who Shaped a Legend > Status Update

In the 1988 biography of Burnley, Margaret Anne Doody said as much: "It's as if there were a quota for female fiction writers, preferably no more than one per century or at most per half-century. We gave one already in Austen, the position is filled." Today we call this phenomenon "the Smurfette Principle," a phrase coined by the critic Katha Pollitt in 1991 in the New York Times.