Getting to Know the First Novelist on the Planet, Murasaki Shikibu

According to historical records that were mentioned and cited by penghuni60.blogspot.com, Murasaki Shikibu is the first novelist on earth. My skeptic side keeps asking what made this believable or acceptable as a fact. I have nothing to prove otherwise, so let’s find out if this really made sense.
It is told that the name is only a pen name, instead of a real one. So there’s no use to trace it back. She may have employed another pen name or her own name which may be very different from the one known by public.
Ms. Shikibu was told to have been born in Fujiwara, Japan. I can’t tell you where it is located for sure as I have never been there, roaming Japan. Yet, she was born presumably circa 973 to a well-endowed family. She was a descendant of the first ruler of Fujiwara.
As a woman, she had tremendous level of intelligence at the time. At the age of 25, she married and of course had sex with the man she was married to and gave birth to a daughter. In my wildest opinion, 25 seemed to be quite old for a virgin to get married. She was a spinster,but Ms. Shikibu certainly was not a creature with a womb to be taken for granted. In 1001, the husband was dead, leaving her daughter orphaned. Afterwards, the shrewd lady was summoned to the palace of Heian as she was known for her outstanding writing talent and eruditeness.
Wait, she was a novelist, wasn’t she? So what did she write anyway? Was it any good? Or was it just a piece of crap people of the era thought of as a work of literature? The novel she produced was Genji Monogatari or The Tales of Monogatari. If I think “The Casual Vacancy” of J.K. Rowling is extremely long a read, I must change my mind when I found out the novel is 1000 pages thick, chopped into 54 chapters. Holy cow, she must have really liked writing, mustn’t she?
And apparently, like modern day authors, she also wrote her autobiography in the form of diary entries kept well and published nowadays.