Beryl Bainbridge, favourite to win the Booker Prize for fiction, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: 'As people spend so little time reading it is a pity they perhaps can't read something a bit deeper, a bit more profound, something with a bit of bite to it.'

Lessing said: 'It would be better, perhaps, if they wrote books about their lives as they really saw them and not these helpless girls, drunken, worrying about their weight and so on."

Fielding said: 'Sometimes I have had people getting their knickers in a twist about Bridget Jones being a disgrace to feminism and so on. But it is good to be able to represent women as they actually are in the age in which you are living

.'Former Booker winner Pat Barker, whose book became the film Regeneration, said reading such books was just a phase readers grew out of. 'Young people, because they have an insecure sense of their own identity, love reading books that confirm that identity'