The divine Felicia Sullivan has hosted and posted a roundtable with Not Chick Lit authors over at her gorgeously relaunched literary magazine Small Spiral Notebook:
Samantha Hunt: The divide is not between men and women or even two camps of women writers. The divide is between art and marketing. In my opinion, the formulaic plots of most chick lit, while they might make a lot of money, do not make good art. There are a number of “how-to write a chick lit book” manuals. I want to read the kind of literature that couldn’t be written by following a how-to manual.
As for Jane Austen, she was not a chick lit writer. She was a writer dealing with the politics of her time: women as wampum and marriage, a business deal. She was activist on the part of romance.