I'M TALKING to a man who doesn't want to be identified. Let's call him Sean. Sean is a successful Irish author. He writes hardboiled thrillers with tough-asnails characters inhabiting a seedy criminal underworld. His novels are critically acclaimed and quite popular, but Sean has a secret life. What a lot of his loyal readers don't know is that Sean also writes women's fiction under a female pseudonym.

Sean has now managed to sell more books under his assumed name than his own true identity, and in the process has become part of an often hidden group of male authors who have managed successfully to negotiate the difficulties of writing about women for women.

For Sean, this transition from one fictional milieu to another was a happy accident. "I sort of fell into it. I didn't set out to do it the way it turned out." Prompted by his wife, Sean decided to write a light-hearted novel inspired by people he met while on holiday in Tenerife. "I wrote this book and the characters were men and women, and I put my own name on it because with four thrillers and three serious literary novels I already had a track record in publishing novels." What happened next surprised him: "I sent the novel around to various publishers and it kept getting rejected. My wife said to me 'I wonder if you tried it under a woman's name would you get a different result.'" Sean decided that this wasn't a bad idea: "I put my grandmother's name on it, and sent it off. About six weeks later the publishers wrote back saying they'd like to read more of the book. This was all done by email so they didn't know who I was, so as far as they were concerned this was coming in from a woman. In due course they came back and offered me a three-book contract.

At this stage they were talking to my wife, and they thought she was the woman who'd written the book. So I came on the phone and told the publisher the truth."

The publisher was a little taken aback, but was sufficiently impressed with the book to publish it and offer Sean a threebook contract for similar material under the same pseudonym. The publisher's initial reaction was telling, and was perhaps grounded not only in a certain bias, but also in an awareness of what the public wants. Sean himself is wary of the fickle nature of the market: "The one big drawback is that you can't do publicity. The reason I'm a bit concerned about coming out of the closet, if you want, is that I have a doubt in my mind whether women would be turned off if they thought it was a man writing the books."

Talking to Sean and other male writers who have made a similar leap reveals not only something about attitudes to men writing women's fiction, but also something about how readers feel about women's fiction in general, and how reading habits have changed.

Vincent Caprani, a self confessed "bald, pipe smoking Dublin printer with an Italian name" published romantic fiction in the '70s under the marvellously Anglo-Protestant name of Charlotte Massey. Vincent's image as a rather atypical romantic novelist did not stop him doing a publicity tour of Britain when his first gothic romance was published. Nor did it harm the book's sales: "It just took off. My first one, Polmarran Tower sold about 250,000 copies, and the publisher then wanted one a year, so I did another three."

His first novel was written in the first person, and Vincent used the image of Deborah Kerr as the governess in The King and I for inspiration whenever he got stuck.

Vincent is certain that being a man writing women's fiction at the time gave him an added novelty value: "The oddness of it certainly helped in my case. As it turned out I had an inbuilt advantage because all the newspapers and TV people were interested in me being the only male writing that kind of fiction."

I tell him about the fear of "coming out" felt by some men currently writing women's fiction:

"Maybe things have changed. It might be a different sort of female readership. In that 30-odd years a lot of women's attitudes have changed. Women are more independent now."

Vincent's opinion is that perhaps female readers today might feel a male author dabbling in the genre is poking fun at them on some level. He also views his years as a romantic novelist in a pragmatic way. "If you're a writer you're a writer, and in my own case I've done a little bit of every type of writing." He refuses to label himself generically and sees himself as an all-rounder, a writer pure and simple, practising different aspects of his craft: "In one way this was just another facet, and in fact it was the most lucrative facet of any writing I did."

Another author I attempted to speak to has not been so lucky.

After publishing his first novel under his own name he spoke openly about the topic of men writing women's fiction and he believes it "backfired" on him. He now writes under a name which his publisher believes to be a "little more elusive."

American author Chris Dyer has had more fortune writing "chick lit" under his own name.

"Conveniently, my mother had the foresight to give me a gender neutral name, but I've been open about it in previous interviews."

Dyer writes humorous, sassy novels which have received the stamp of approval from Marian Keyes. Dyer has also encountered what seems to be a prevailing sniping attitude: "I haven't encountered snobbery for being a man who writes women's fiction, but I've encountered plenty of condescension for writing women's fiction. I don't think people who write genre fiction of any kind are spared this sort of thing, whether they're crossing gender lines, or not. It's just life in the literary food chain."

And that seems to be the experience of many male writers writing pseudonymously. It seems that fears about gender bias are masking a broader undercurrent, an elitist attitude perhaps felt by both men and women towards the genre. Sean states it bluntly: "I do believe that women's fiction is ghettoised because it appeals to women."

Vincent Caprani may also have touched on something when talking about women fearing that male authors writing as females are somehow mocking them. It might point to a kind of lurking shame felt by people who read throwaway novels regardless of genre and gender.

Chris Dyer has experienced this ghettoisation of women's fiction, and the almost subconscious knee jerk reaction which fuels it. "In my experience, the contempt knows no gender bounds, and in fact, most men tend to be rather impressed that I've actually written a book at all . . . and gotten it published . . . as if I've scored some game-winning goal. I have gotten far more flak from some women friends who have been clearly disappointed in me, not because I'm invading their territory, but because they think I'm somehow languishing in some literary slum. As one dear old friend put it, hopefully, when I told her that I was working on my third novel: 'Is it a real book?'"