The novel is dead – again. And this time, it's women who have murdered it | Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett | Opinion | The Guardian

The novel has died again. I've been baited into reading yet another obituary, this time written by the Secret Author (a "former professor of English and creative writing at a leading British university") who laments, in the Critic magazine, the decline of serious novels about middle-class morals and God, in favour of those focusing on "identity politics". Sally Rooney and Zadie Smith are cited as the writers who symbolise this supposed decline. It did not escape my notice that these writers happen to be women, while the literary God-botherers of the past have tended to be men. Over the years, the novel has died more deaths than a cat. It has died from loneliness, and it has died as a result of its own stupidity. This time, it has died because women have murdered it.