In recent years the essay has been revitalised as a form by a new generation of women whose writing gives urgent voice to the old adage that the personal is political. In marrying lived experience with the rigours of investigative journalism and critical analysis, these writers on both sides of the Atlantic are illuminating cultural and political changes in a way that recalls the heyday of the essay form in the work of Susan Sontag and Joan Didion.

The pre-eminent voice among them is Rebecca Solnit, whose work has moved from cult status to mainstream here and in the US since the viral success of her 2008 essay Men Explain Things to Me, credited with identifying the phenomenon of “mansplaining” (though the word is not hers).

Approaching 60, Solnit was described as an activist long before the term was commonplace, and much of her writing has been born from her immersion in protest movements, notably around environmental issues and the rights of indigenous peoples. Her slim 2005 book, Hope in the Dark, was reissued in 2016 in the wake of Trump’s election, as a manifesto and a rallying cry for progressives.

Whose Story Is This? continues the preoccupation of her last collection, The Mother of All Questions, with the issue of whose voices are legitimised and whose silenced.

“Who gets to be the subject of the story is an immensely political question,” she notes in the title essay, in which she tackles the myth of a “real” America (white, male and working class) disproportionately pandered to by the right. It’s a question she examines here most prominently in relation to women’s rights, from the testimony of Christine Blasey Ford to the rise of the incel movement.

Solnit has been criticised on occasion by younger feminists for the fact that her essays are exercises in consciousness-raising, often stating the obvious without proposing concrete solutions beyond telling our stories. She appears to address this obliquely in the introductory piece, by pointing out that “we live inside ideas”, and emphasising that the reshaping of these ideas over time demands work. “It’s easy now to assume that one’s perspectives on race, gender, orientation and the rest are signs of inherent virtue, but a lot of ideas currently in circulation are gifts that arrived recently, through the labours of others.”

Solnit’s quote on the jacket of Jia Tolentino’s debut collection, Trick Mirror – “the best young essayist at work in the United States” – suggests that she has already appointed her successor. Tolentino, 30, came of age as a writer for the feminist website Jezebel, before moving to the New Yorker, and her essays reflect a sensibility formed in that environment: “flogging my own selfhood on the internet”, as she describes it.

She is upfront in her introduction about the obvious self-absorption of the personal essay – “writing is either a way to shed my self-delusions or a way to develop them” – and if her arguments lack the elegant certainties of a writer such as Solnit, the frankness with which she expresses self-doubt and confusion seems an apt reflection of the cultural currents she sets out to investigate.

Personal experience figures prominently in the pieces here, from her teenage experience on an early reality TV show, to growing up in an evangelical megachurch that was “so big we called it the Repentagon”.

Elsewhere, she considers the social and cultural pressures on young women in Always Be Optimizing, a whistlestop drive through the vast subject of feminism and the beauty myth, in the light of her obsession with barre class. “We were lucky, I thought, dissociating, to even be able to indulge these awful priorities, to have the economic capital to be able to accrue more social capital via our looks.”

If the essay holds up the absurdity of desiring this commodification of ourselves while acknowledging the awfulness of it, without offering answers, this is entirely in keeping with the spirit of the book: the act of inquiry is worthwhile in itself, if only in ensuring that we are not sleepwalking. Regardless, Tolentino offers a sharp eye that cuts through the multiple distorted reflections thrown back at women by the culture that surrounds us.

Rachel Cusk has always written fearlessly about personal experience as a way of considering the expectations on women, from the inequalities of motherhood to the destruction and reinvention that comes with divorce, and has often faced considerable backlash from other women for her frankness, so a new collection of her nonfiction is always to be eagerly anticipated.

The first section, which contains the title essay, gathers a series of reflections on a particular stage of mid-life. Making Home and Lions on Leashes consider the reconfiguring of identity that comes with the point at which teenage children outgrow their home, and what the idea of “home” means as a woman and a writer.

Cusk is rarely political in the explicit sense, but On Rudeness begins with an observation of immigration officers at an airport in the aftermath of the 2016 EU referendum and expands to examine the role of language and expression in the social divisions made visible by the vote. Cusk’s unsparing ability to see links between her own experience and broader literary and historical perspectives has always elevated her personal writing above mere memoir, and this collection cements her reputation as one of the most fierce and elegant chroniclers of how we live now.

• Whose Story Is This: Old Conflicts, New Chapters by Rebecca Solnit is published by Granta (£12.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99

• Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion by Jia Tolentino is published by 4th Estate (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99

• Coventry by Rachel Cusk is published by Faber (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99