The thesis takes a metacritical VIew of the application of feminist methodology to the fictional writing of Rosa Montero and Esther Tusquets. It places this in the context of current debates concerning the relationship between aesthetics and ideology in readings of literature, drawing on theories of both feminist and democratic aesthetics. Whilst I take the view that the appropriation of the authors' work as feminist is problematic, it is not my concern either to deny its gender-political content or to critique its gender-political stance. Instead, I contend that critical associations between feminism and form have been limiting, relying too strongly on an idiom of subversion, and creating homologies between social and narrative structures. I therefore argue that a different kind of attention to form and language is necessary. Outlining an individual 'aesthetic' for each writer, I aim to describe the 'perceptual values' (Wellek and Warren 1956: 34) according to which political and formal concerns are brought together in the authors' writing. This not only allows for a more nuanced reading of the ways in which politics inhere in their texts, but generates a more democratic understanding of the ways in which gender-political writing inheres in the social and political realm.