The novelist Jenny Colgan tore into "hairy-legged" female book critics who looked down their noses at chick-lit.

The author of Amanda's Wedding said a whole generation of writing about young women's lives was being trashed by commentators who took one look at a "fluffy pink cover" and got out their knives.

"Everyone, no matter what they are writing about - be it dysfunctional families, anorexia, death or other serious issues - is being thrown into one big hole marked 'chick-lit', and written off," she told the Edinburgh book festival last night.

"Chick-lit is a deliberately condescending term they use to rubbish us all. If they called it slut-lit it couldn't be any more insulting."

She said female critics were most guilty of this damaging generalisation, and rose to the defence of Helen Fielding and her bestseller Bridget Jones's Diary, which she said had suffered "unjust attacks from people who haven't even read it".

"It's a terrific book and it has sold more than two million copies. They have not all been bought by lovelorn single women in London."

The 32-year-old writer blamed what she called the "hairy-leggers" in the critical establishment for perpetuating the myth that anything in a pastel cover had to be pap. "There are good books and bad books, but all are lumped together, and it's derogatory.

"I know a lot of these writers, and it is a bit absurd we have to feel slightly apologetic about what we do because of a tranche of the media has deemed us to be the ruination of the publishing industry."

Chick-lit, she argued, was more a marketing term than a real genre. "It's time we reclaimed the name."

Colgan, whose last book, Looking For Andrew McCarthy, is a about a man working in an office, said the chick-lit slur meant "not a single man will buy it because it has a pastel cover".