Nicole Ward Jouve argues for a necessary relation to male and female, inside and outside, in the creative act and the formation of a creative sense of self. She sees both being engendered and engendering, with the attendant figures of the Mother and the Father, as part and parcel of the ways gender is experienced. The book explores these themes by drawing upon the work of writers in French and English, male and female, such as Balzac, Lawrence, de Beauvoir, Woolf, Carter, Roberts and Plath. The book takes stock of both French and Anglo-American- feminisms, and debates with psychoanalysis as well as literature through figures such as Freud, Jung, Lacan, Winnicott and Milner.