Building notably on the recent critical approaches found in Kate Krueger’s British Women Writers and the Short Story, 1850-1930: Reclaiming Social Space (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and British Women Short Story Writers: The New Woman to Now (Emma Young and James Bailey eds., Edinburgh UP, 2015), this paper offers new insights into the question of the existence of a “separatist aesthetic theory of the twentieth-century woman’s short story,” to take up Hermione Lee’s words in her introduction to The Secret Self 1: Short Stories by Women (1985). It first retraces the history of the attempts at theorization in the field, focusing on “voice” as a recurring critical tool, on material culture, and on the correspondences between theory and ideological contexts. Using past and recent approaches to the question, together with the contributions of contemporary women writers in the form of fiction, essays and interviews (Helen Simpson, Janice Galloway, Ali Smith and Michèle Roberts), it then uncovers lines of filiation between some of these British contemporary short story tellers and their female predecessors, and examines how British women short fiction writers form a community grounded both in their common experiences as women, readers and writers, and in the symbolical exchanges amongst them. The last part of the paper envisions the critical method that might enable us to answer Mary Eagleton’s 1985 still valid question “Can we create a criticism which is non-essentialist, non-reductive but subtly alive to the links of gender and genre?” It suggests that this method should rely on the following critical tools, literary categories and subjects: hierarchy, space, subjectivity, fantasy, voice, metaphor, anger, agency, playfulness.