One of the truths we take to be self-evident is that it is great polemics that change women's lives. But whatever happened to that great, and in many ways far trickier, tradition: fiction for, by and about women? Ask most of us for the title of a life-changing book and we are likely to pick a much-loved novel or even a collection of poems. It is not hard to see why. Great fiction always welcomes our return, there to find new meanings, explore old ambiguities.

For Linda Grant, journalist, non-fiction writer and Orange Prize-winning novelist: "It is the novels I go back to, particularly Fay Weldon's Down Among The Women and Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook. I can think of non-fiction that was important to me but I wouldn't re-read it because one has absorbed the arguments and time has moved on."

That was then, but what about now? Where is the literary writing, as opposed to the fiction-lite of a Helen Fielding or Amy Jenkins, that explores the deeper truths about domestic life, friendship, motherhood, political involvement? Maybe we don't write like that because we don't live like that?

According to Anna Davis, one of the few women to feature in the recent much-vaunted New Puritan collection: "The New Puritans have been criticised for being influenced by cinema and popular culture, but when I listen to people talking on the street, they are talking about EastEnders. In many ways, these are selfish times. This is an era of trivia."

But we are undoubtedly the poorer for it. What was so important about some of the earlier women writers was that they granted their heroines a complex consciousness, a consciousness we take for granted in grown-up contemporary fiction by the likes of Philip Roth or Saul Bellow.

Simone de Beauvoir's The Mandarins, published in 1954, is probably one of the most monumental novels to describe masochistic, dependent love, political commitment and deep sexual love in one tale. Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, published in 1962, both charted the illusions and despair of a political generation and showed, literally, how women break down.

At the same time, writers such as Lessing, Margaret Drabble and Fay Weldon brought a ruthless honesty to their descriptions of motherhood. The feminist movement threw up its own explicit, polemical fiction. "This book changes lives" proclaims my copy of Marilyn French's The Women's Room. While there was undoubtedly mediocre work produced under the feminist flag, the best of it was serious women writing about serious stuff. It allowed a kind of multi-layered subjectivity that seems to have been ironed away by the relentless cigs, calories and condoms mentality.

Of course there are good women writers, young and old. Zadie Smith, Linda Grant, Maggie Gee, Hilary Mantel, Pat Barker. Lessing, Drabble and Weldon are all still publishing. But as the critic James Wood recently wrote, the fiction that dominates our consciousness and the market is penned largely by men and refuses "to take much note of place, history or society". Some of British fiction's most eminent women, such as Jeanette Winterson, avoid engagement with what we might call ordinary, rooted experience. AL Kennedy's last book was about bullfighting.

Enter Helen Simpson, the brilliant short story writer chosen as one of Granta's Best of Young British novelists and former Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year. Simpson's first two collections were wondrous wisps of satire, surreal snippets of modern sexual manners. But in her new collection, Hey Yeah Right Get A Life, she offers us something both subtly and significantly altered: a searing portrayal of modern womanhood that feels like some kind of restoral. In her slim, satirical, angry tales, we meet Jade the teenager repulsed by the "ragged cuticles ... heels stuck out from the backs of her sandals like hunks of Parmesan" of a mother she meets on the street struggling to get a lentil out of her child's nose. Then there is Dorrie, the stay-at-home mother who patiently endures the "seamless cycle of nourishment and devoural" that is family life, allowing herself snatched moments of solitude and a dream of a different future.

In some ways, it seems odd to argue that Simpson is the modern inheritor of an earlier tradition of truth-telling about women's lives. There is nothing polemical in her stories. They have a comic lightness born of rigorous craft. To an undiscerning reader, her heroines, most more or less desperate mothers, could be Bridget Jones postpartum. But in the current bland climate, her stories seem almost revolutionary. I doubt a less admired writer would have been published on such an unpromising subject as women at home, women in despair.

Simpson recognises that she has written something oddly new yet old. "The way people have been talking about it, before it's even published, I can see there will be some ... hostility." She hesitates. "Someone came up to me yesterday and said: 'You've written a political book.' I feel I've breached some kind of taboo." Which is odd, again, given the near saturation of our culture with ersatz tales of contemporary motherhood.

But if she is updating domestic fiction, in the best truthful tradition, Simpson's heroines never make it past the front door. In that sense, her work reflects the personal and political quiescence of our time. We still lack a literature that describes women in a wider context, women as citizens in the wider community, nation or globe, the kind of complex fiction that characterises the work of the Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer.

According to Maggie Gee, author of The Burning Book, one of the most brilliant personal/political novels of the 80s: "There are people, men and women, writing about wider society. But so many things, such as the market, the critical consensus or the slant towards historical fiction, stop us seeing it. A good writer like Pat Barker, who had written novels about contemporary Britain, began to get more serious attention when she wrote about reputable literary men in the first world war." Gee believes: "If you are interested in language and structure, write about contemporary society and are political, it somehow doesn't fit into the critical grid."

We can but hope. Anna Davis sees positive changes in both public life and publishing. "The protests against the World Bank suggest that something is changing. There's a new politics, a new generation out there. People in publishing are getting fed up of the Bridget Jones thing and talking about wanting to publish writing that has a wider sweep. Things could now be on the turn."

Hey Yeah Right Get A Life by Helen Simpson is published this week by Jonathan Cape, £14.99.