Probably because I’m of the opinion that as long as we still have reason to wedge “women” as a qualifier before “essayist,” the age is not exactly golden. And yet it’s hard to deny there’s something afoot. Essayists who happen to be women are having a banner year.

Tickets to see Lena Dunham as she travels the nation this fall on the book tour for her essay collection, “Not That Kind of Girl,” sold out practically the moment they became available, but the success of two recent essay collections by writers who don’t have their own television shows perhaps serves as a more meaningful indicator when grappling with the question at hand. “The Empathy Exams,” by Leslie Jamison, and “Bad Feminist,” by Roxane Gay, both made the New York Times paperback nonfiction best-seller list. Both books were by authors who were mostly unknown to a wider general audience but beloved by many who frequent the literary orbit that has grown on the Internet over the past half-dozen years. It’s a generally supportive group of writers, booksellers, online magazine editors and avid fans who track the daily offerings on websites like The Rumpus, McSweeney’s, The Millions, Slate and Salon, and then go to their own social media pages to post what they love or loathe.

It was online that I first read Gay and Jamison (who has since become a Bookends columnist), and it’s online that I’ve done most of my essay reading in recent years, discovering and sharing work by writers both new and already known to me. In this insular yet influential milieu — where the measure of success has nothing to do with book deals or best-seller lists but is quite simply many people posting a link preceded by a sentiment along the lines of You have to read this — the personal essay is king. Online, any number of women essayists have found, if not fame, at least a fervent following of the sort that would be hard to imagine happening elsewhere. Among even the noblest publishers, essay collections are generally as popular as a kid with head lice at a slumber party, thanks to the oft-repeated mantra that essay collections don’t sell. Never mind Joan Didion, Anne Lamott, Alice Walker, Nora Ephron, Annie Dillard, Meghan Daum, Sloane Crosley, Zadie Smith and Sarah Vowell, among many others — and I haven’t even mentioned all the men essayists — whose collections definitely sell in spite of the fact that they aren’t supposed to. (I also wonder about the maddening chicken-and-egg situation of those essay collections not made available for sale because, well, they “don’t sell.”)

When I saw “The Empathy Exams” appear on the best-seller list in April and “Bad Feminist” appear there in August, I felt that the ground had shifted ever so slightly. Not for women, necessarily, but for the essay itself. Surely many factors can be rightly credited for the success of those books — that they’re intelligent and beautifully written, for starters. That they were well served by editors, designers and marketing and publicity teams who knew what they were doing counts too. But I can’t help thinking their success also owes something to those in the online literary community whose You have to read this enthusiasm spilled over into the real world. By which I mean a whole lot of people went out and bought books by authors they probably wouldn’t have found if it weren’t for the Internet. If we’re in a golden age of anything, I’d say it’s that: a slightly more democratic route for essayists of both sexes to get themselves on the literary map.

Cheryl Strayed is the author of the #1 New York Times best seller “Wild,” the New York Times best seller “Tiny Beautiful Things,” and the novel “Torch.” Strayed’s writing has appeared in “The Best American Essays,” The New York Times Magazine, Vogue, Salon, Tin House, The Rumpus — where she wrote the popular “Dear Sugar” advice column — and elsewhere. The movie adaptation of “Wild,” starring Reese Witherspoon, will be released in December. Strayed holds an MFA in fiction writing from Syracuse University and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Minnesota. She lives in Portland, Ore., with her husband and their two children.