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.
First, a fiery allegory – the reviewer’s house is burning down! After tossing the cats out of the window, she has time only to save one object before fleeing: either a compact disc reissue of Sarah Bernhardt declaiming from Phèdre or an old sepia-tinted postcard of Eleonora Duse in D’Annunzio’s La Città morta. Quick! Which to choose? The Bernhardt has...
You speak like a green girl,Unsifted in such perilous circumstance.
Hamlet, I.iii.101-2
Ayear ago this past autumn – a year before the old life so shockingly blew away – I made a long-contemplated trip to France and Belgium to see the cemeteries of the First World War. My quest, though transatlantic, was a modest, conventional and somewhat anorakish one: I hoped to locate the grave...
Living without love is like not living at all.
Art Pepper, 1958
Writing this in San Francisco, having just come back from San Diego and a heroin Christmas at my mother’s. Not that I used any: there was definitely no blowing, horning, tasting, fixing, goofing, getting loaded or laying out. I’ve always been afraid of serious drugs, knowing my grip on ‘things being...
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...
Terry Castle talks to Thomas Jones about Patricia Highsmith.
‘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...
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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