Terry Castle

John Heath is right to distinguish traditional Cretan music from the gritty urban (usually Athenian) recorded music of the 1920s and 1930s known as rebétika (Letters, 5 February). I was obviously hitting the ouzo. But in my own defence I find, consulting the liner notes of Greek-Oriental Rebetica: The Golden Years: 1911-37, that the words of my favourite rebétika song, ‘If I were the hem of your...

Alas, in my review of Rosemary Mahoney’s A Likely Story: One Summer with Lillian Hellman I mistranscribed the final line of Eileen Myles’s poem, ‘On the Death of Robert Lowell’ (LRB, 15 April). It should read ‘Fucking dead’, not ‘Fucking nuts’. My sincere apologies to Eileen Myles for this authorial flub.

There has been a spate of reports in the British press saying that in my essay about Jane Austen’s letters (LRB, 3 August) I made the claim that Jane Austen ‘may have been gay’ or may have had a ‘lesbian relationship’ with her sister Cassandra.My comments have been grotesquely, indeed almost comically, distorted. Nowhere in my essay did I state that Jane Austen was a lesbian – certainly...

In her response to my review of Eliza Fenwick’s 1795 novel Secresy (Letters, 9 March) Amanda Sebestyen accuses me of Being Mean (à la George Eliot) to ‘silly lady novelists’ of the 18th century like Fenwick. In turn, I am Not Mean Enough, it seems, to Jane Austen, that ‘crucial contributor to the terrain of English conservatism’ who wrote ‘uncomplainingly of women’s dependency while...