Terry Castle

Terry Castle has taught at Stanford since 1983. Her books include The Apparitional Lesbian, The Female Thermometer: 18th-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny and a memoir, The Professor. She has written in the LRB about Jane Austen’s letters to her sister, Cassandra; about meeting Hillary Clinton; her uneasy semi-friendship with Susan Sontag; Patricia Highsmith’s worst thoughts; and her obsession with Art Pepper.

Adieu, madame: Sarah Bernhardt

Terry Castle, 4 November 2010

Sarah Bernhardt’s strangest gift – or so it seems a hundred years after the fact – was her ability to make the most improbable people go cuckoo over her. An otherwise mopey young D.H. Lawrence, for example. In 1908, having seen her perform one of her signature roles – Marguerite, the doomed courtesan in La Dame aux camélias – Lawrence sounds like a decadent...

Diary: Moving House

Terry Castle, 27 August 2009

Thinking about the three things I learned yesterday, courtesy of Levine Breaking News – a mysterious right-wing, LA-based, showbiz-obsessed website that sends me, unsolicited, ‘breaking story’ email updates several times a day. The first: Odontophobia is the fear of teeth. Good to know, but surely raises some questions. Whose teeth? What about that lady on the catafalque in...

Leaf through old New York Times reviews of the novels of Maude Hutchins – from the 1950s and early 1960s especially, when her reputation was at its height – and one is instantly struck by it: the old-maid-like embarrassment she aroused in her critics. Not one of them could get through an essay about her, it seems, without a biddyish dilation on the carnality of her themes....

First, a somewhat spittle-laden squawk: how one positively slavers for a good biography of the astonishing French artist known as Claude Cahun (1894-1954). Mention her in conversation and you are likely to draw a puzzled ‘Claude who?’ even from otherwise predatory culture vultures. In my own case – it’s true – certain vile French diphthongs may be part of the problem: the phonetic distinctions between Cahun, Caen, Caïn, Cannes, Cohn, canne, cane, cagne, camp, cône and con remain, sadly, a perpetual trial. Yet it’s also undeniable: though one of the most extraordinary personalities associated with both the French Surrealist movement and the Resistance, Cahun is still scarcely known to an English-speaking public.

Travels with My Mom: in Santa Fe

Terry Castle, 16 August 2007

Off to a great start at lunch in Phoenix airport: Terrorist Threat Level Orange for ‘high’ as usual, women’s restrooms jammed, and then the waiter in Aunt Chilada’s Cantina – garish faux-Mexican with a jalapeño pepper theme – calls me ‘sir’ when he takes our order. Fume for a second, then descend into bath of elemental shame. Why does this always happen to me? Do I really look like a guy? No doubt, after great persecution, I will suffer the miserable and lonely death of the sexual pervert. Can’t squeak about it, though: my mother is sitting right across from me in her US Airways wheelchair – peering around inquisitively at the lissom Hispanic busboys, off-duty pilots eating lunch, and our monstrously fat fellow diners.

One Night in Maidenhead

Jean McNicol, 30 October 1997

‘Honey, she’s a forerunner, that’s what she is, a kind of pioneer that’s got left behind. I believe she’s the beginning of things like me.’ Radclyffe Hall has...

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Paean to Gaiety

Lorna Sage, 22 September 1994

In this camp and dashing and deliberately lightweight study of a certain strand of ‘sexual ontology’ Terry Castle pursues the lesbian-as-ghost from Defoe’s wistful nearly-real...

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