Previous ideologies about the reading woman resulted in circumscriptions of women's rights to education and free access to literature. Today women in the western world are considered to have unlimited access to education and literature. But research has shown that there still are traces of old-established ideologies of the woman reader in today's society. If so, it is possible that women experience hindrances in the identity as a reader. The overall purpose of the study is to examine representations of the woman reader in fictional texts during different time periods in order to illustrate the hindrances and opportunities that emerge in relation to women´s reading. This is accomplished by examining common discourses about the woman reader in three fictional texts and in what way the discourses have changed during the course of time. The questions are studied with the background of previous research about the woman reader by Flint (1993), Golden (2003) and Jack (2012). The methodology used is Fairclough´s (2015) critical discourse analysis. The result and analysis show that there are five common discourses about the woman reader in the studied material, whereof four shows hindrances and one opportunities women experience in their identity as a reader. The discourses have changed in a way that indicates social struggle. The result and analysis suggests that it is possible that there is a connection between the discourses and previous ideologies. The conclusion is that it is important for libraries to observe attention to whether women express barriers to reading, what these hindrances are and in what situations they arise.