I can honestly say it had never occurred to me that the narrator was female. But then I thought there were problems with the way the book dealt with women; I sort of figured Ladies of Grace was Clarke getting to the end of JS&MN and realizing she'd written what, eight hundred pages and there weren't any women in England with any agency.

Which, while it does indeed create an unreal and fantastic nation unlike the England we know, is perhaps not ideal.

(I do quite like JS&MN, don't get me wrong. I think it is one of the very few fantasies where the elves are suitably horrible. And it's probably been almost ten years since I read it, so I might assess it differently now.)