In 1979, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar began their influential account of the nineteenth-century tradition of women's writing, The Madwoman in the Attic, by arguing that in the Western patriarchal tradition the author is equated with the father – a ‘progenitor, a procreator, an aesthetic patriarch whose pen is an instrument of generative power like his penis’. For Gilbert and Gubar, the pen is like the penis in its ability not only to ‘generate life’ for the poet but also to ‘create a posterity to which he lays claim’. Gilbert and Gubar's striking formulation of the literary pen(is) has been elaborated, rather differently, by Marlon Ross in The Contours of Masculine Desire (1989). Ross comments on the male Romantic poet's ambivalence towards sexual reproduction and his desire for an alternative ‘transcendence’ achieved through literary reproduction: he can live on in his work rather than in his offspring. Ross argues that, by contrast, ‘Feminine influence’ is ‘based on the necessity of shared space (the womb), on the necessary limits of beginning (birth) and ending (death) in time and space, on the need to share knowledge without a hierarchy of rewards (the training and nurturing of children without remuneration)’.