Returning older and wiser ... Sex and the City's Carrie.
While some of Australia's leading publishing houses have said ''chick lit'' never went out of fashion or favour, in 2013 the keepers of the traditional publishing flame appear to be upping the ante and throwing themselves at the mercy of young women - ladies cut from the Gen Y cloth who probably know more about Lauren Conrad than Joseph.
Over the years there have been a few books that have topped bestseller lists - Tina Fey's Bossypants, Kelly Cutrone's If You Have to Cry, Go Outside and anything by Chelsea Handler spring to mind - that seem to have created a hybrid (and lucrative) genre of chick lit and self-help, or ''chick help'' as I call it.
While literature turned 50 shades of poorly written and pornographic grey last year, ''chick help'' will be huge in 2013.
The third instalment of the Bridget Jones story by Helen Fielding will be released and Sex and the City creator Candace Bushnell is reportedly writing a new chapter for her heroine Carrie, aka Elizabeth Bennet in designer shoes. According to The New York Times, an older and wiser Carrie will return and may even be living in the country. Will Bridget still be smoking? Will she still be weighing in more frequently than a Biggest Loser contestant? Has Big dragged Carrie to the country? Does she dodge manure in Manolos?
Is it a coincidence these bastions of '90s and noughties popular culture are making their return during a year full of literary significance for women?
While it will be great to see Bridge and Carrie again, it will be 12 months tinged with sadness. Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar will turn 50 at the same time a novel titled Drinking & Tweeting and Other Brandi Blunders, written by a Real Housewives star, Brandi Glanville, will most probably sell out around the world.
In her part-memoir, part-self-help book, Glanville covers such topics as plastic surgery, drinking and her messy divorce from husband Eddie Cibrian and his subsequent marriage to singer LeAnn Rimes.
''A brand-new vagina would be an Eddie-free vagina … I decided that since Eddie had ruined my vagina for me, he could pay for a new one. I gave [the doctor's office] Eddie's credit card number,'' she muses about her surgery to rejuvenate her lady parts.
On a brighter note, though, the book written by the world's most famous spinster - who coined the phrase ''let's take a turn about the room'', also known as the heritage-listed precursor to the ''selfie'' - is celebrating its 200th birthday.
If she were alive today, Jane Austen wouldn't be celebrating with her nine cats and a vegan cake, she'd be demanding cash, according to one of her fans.
On January 27, 1813, the 38-year-old Austen received the first printed volumes of Pride and Prejudice in the mail from her publisher.
The Jane Austen Society of Australia's president, Susannah Fullerton, says Austen received the equivalent of $1000 in profits from her entire body of literary work.
Last year, the creator and star of Girls, 26-year-old Lena Dunham, received a $3.5 million advance for her collection of essays, which will be published in 2013.
Snippets of Dunham's work may, as suggested by the writer, include lines such as ''at 24 I felt like an old maid''. The acronym FUPA may also make an appearance - for the uninitiated (or thin people), that stands for ''fat upper pubic area''. All this from the actor who sat naked eating cake during the opening skit at the 2012 Emmy Awards.
If great creators of prose such as Austen and Plath were alive today, would they be taking to Twitter in order to write off ''chick help'' as trite and trash?
The assistant curator at the National Library, Susannah Helman, would like to think Austen, especially, would be supportive of the sisterhood of the written word.
''It wouldn't be right to see her as ultra-conservative, even in a modern context,'' Helman says. ''Her biting wit, use of irony, depth of perception and the beautiful way she used the English language is why her work has stood the test of time. She's the ultimate stylist and was so widely read that she would be open to new ideas and methods of writing.''
Fullerton, whose passion for Austen is similar to the way most teenage girls feel about One Direction, disagrees.
''A lot of the chick-lit writers these days are very waffly and don't say all that much,'' she says. ''The majority of them will be enjoyed but forgotten in a decade. Pride and Prejudice has stood the test of time.''
Jenna Clarke is the entertainment and lifestyle reporter for The Canberra Times.
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