New professional femininity: gender and work narratives in chick-lit

This study investigates how contemporary women’s fiction—particularly novels by Sophie Kinsella, Marian Keyes, Meg Cabot, Emily O’Leary, and Veronica Henry—constructs a model of new professional femininity through the language of everyday experience. Focusing on humour, self-irony, and emotionally charged speech, it shows how women’s working lives and professional identities are narrated as ongoing processes shaped by ambition, vulnerability, and the demand for self-control. Drawing on postfeminist perspectives, the analysis demonstrates that Chick-Lit reframes work not as a static marker of success but as a discursive space in which femininity is negotiated, tested, and reimagined. The genre thus emerges as a cultural record of how contemporary women articulate competence, care, and self-respect under the pressures of modern professional life.