It’s this urge for like-minded company that is said to be causing the rebirth of the literary salon, a type of gathering which first became famous in the 17th and 18th centuries in France, when writers and philosophers got into the habit of meeting under the roof of an inspiring host or hostess and spending the evening talking about their work.

This, anyway, is what my writer friend, Candida Clark, a six-foot, swaying blonde (and the author of five highly praised novels), told me the other day. "Darling," she said, "of course it’s true: salons are back!" At first the only thing I could do was laugh. Let’s face it, in this utility age of pre-packed sandwiches, e-mail, and Ant & Dec, the idea of people taking time off from rushing around and multitasking just to dress up and play around with words seems too preposterous.

But on second thoughts, perhaps it’s not so crazy. Cast your mind back to the heyday of literary salondom. The real salons were fantastic parties disguised as lessons in self-improvement. Their professed aim was to refine the guests’ taste and increase their knowledge through conversation and readings of poetry, philosophy or just each other’s novels. But it’s not hard to tell what they were really up to: gossip, champagne, dressing up and generally sparkling.

Take Mademoiselle de Scudery, for instance, better known as "the incomparable Sapho", the hostess of the Salon du samedi. Her sprawling novels, packed with Oriental or classical heroines falling victim to more abductions than a long-suffering Bond girl, were shaped by the fashionable ideas of the day. But what is best remembered about her salon today, long after her novels have been forgotten, is its intellectual, yet sharply dressed and leggy, female guest list: the originators of the term "bluestockings".

So what counts as a revived salon in 21st-century London? I asked Candida. Book clubs count, she says. Yes, your average bog-standard book club; the kind Rachel Cusk recently wrote about not liking, stinging her former reading partners into injured ripostes. So does the hard-working gathering of women novelists who write at the British Library, escaping the silence of the reading rooms to discuss their plots at the super-calorific cake counter. So does the more celebratory gathering of novelists that takes every few months or so in a North London pub, guests of Amanda Craig, the writer and Times reviewer, who likes to invite 50 women writers to dress up, drink wine and share writing know-how.

I’ve been to a couple of things like this myself, I realise, including a fairly racy night at the Savoy in which the literary guests were invited to share reminiscences of their first memory of sex. I wasn’t sure I completely enjoyed them. Mostly I found it a bit nerve-racking to have to introduce yourself to a roomful of complete strangers, discover that your latest vis-à-vis’s name was, say, Zuleika Puddleduck, or George de la Zouch, and desperately search your inner Google for whatever you might remember of reviews of his or her works. Worse still, you could see on their faces that they were engaged in exactly the same struggle as they mouthed your name. Still, it was encouraging to hear that all these eccentric manifestations of literary life count as salons.

"What else do you include?" I pursued, and discovered that our own dear Essayists’ Club also counted. It was the brainchild of Candida and a few other friends, who all got talking at a party at my place a year ago and decided to start a shorthand version of a book club; instead of having to wade through a whole book you would only have to read a few pages of an essay by Pope, or Shaw, or Orwell to be invited to an evening’s discussion (plus champagne, gossip and whatever food you could rustle up).

It didn’t just count. It was the epitome of the thing. She was even going to write about us being the real deal in Time Out. Which was a joy, and not just because with the Essayists there was none of that sweaty-palmed business of having to hope your name was illustrious enough to impress a stranger (or vice versa). But also because, a year on, after several meetings in different houses and flats, we’d reunited at my place and were once again having a fag in the courtyard after eating pickled-herring-and-black-bread snacks and drinking an elegant quantity of wine and listening to (a) a clever essay by Pope and (b) an equally clever rhymed denunciation of talentless amateur writers, in the style of Pope, by Ranjit Bolt, a slightly sceptical new recruit.

And we actually were having a lot of fun, as if we were at a fantastic party. And I was the hostess: Mlle de Scudery revisited! So now I’m sure it’s true. Literary salons are back!

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