Seductress Extraordinaire

Terry Castle

‘That Furious Lesbian’: The Story of Mercedes de Acosta by Robert Schanke
Women in Turmoil: Six Plays by Mercedes de Acosta, edited by Robert Schanke

You know you’re getting old when sleeping with a vampire no longer gives you a sickly thrill. At the age of ten or eleven, having absorbed the requisite number of creaky old Bela Lugosi films, I evolved such a baleful Dracula-fear that I began sleeping every night with one arm slung backwards over my neck. This neurotic and slightly awkward posture – still habitual, I’m embarrassed to say – was meant to be prophylactic: even while snoozing, I figured, I’d be ready to fend off any emissaries from the undead who tried to bite me.

Subscribers to the print edition can log in to view the entire article. For information about subscribing to the London Review of Books click here. This article is available for purchase online. Buy this article.

Terry Castle lives in San Francisco and teaches at Stanford. She is the editor of The Literature of Lesbianism, and the author of Boss Ladies, Watch Out!, a book of essays, many from the LRB. She has a blog at terry-castle-blog.blogspot.com

Seductress Extraordinaire

Terry Castle

From the archive