Winner of the 2003 Lambda Literary Editor's Choice Award
Named one of the Year's Ten Best Books of 2003 by The Advocate

"Castle brings her characteristic good humor and wide-ranging intelligence to bear on... what she sees as the ubiquity of "the lesbian idea" in the Western literature.... Recommended for women's studies, sexuality, and comparative literature collections."
Library Journal

"Castle makes a genial host . . . [and] we begin to get a clearer sense of the moral and imaginative power of female homosexuality. Castle is a grand debunker in everything she writes. Her refreshing common sense and humour gives this enormous book an enormous appeal. A marvellous introduction charts the territories covered. There are no encumbering notes, but extensive further reading is offered, and her introductions to the entries are alert, good-natured, helpful and entertaining."
Times Literary Supplement

"This innovative anthology will serve as a superb resource both as a text and as a secondary reading for courses in women's studies, queer studies, gender studies, and introduction to literature courses. . . . Highly recommended."
Choice

"Castle's full, rich, and spirited selection exults in the risk of border crossings. Reading with an acute critical sense of historical change, she has defined her topic with inclusive generosity, admitting peeping toms as well as embattled advocates to her band of literary lesbian writers. The effect is emancipatory, mind-stretching, witty, and often joyous."
Marina Warner

"Castle should be commended for adding such an essential volume to any literary bookshelf."
Elizabeth Millard, ForeWord

"Castle has a consistently engaging style that will draw general readers as well as scholars of feminist criticism and gay and lesbian literary theory."
Diane Rogers, Stanford Magazine

"Castle's massive and highly readable volume is a greater, more encompassing accumulation and exploration of the origin and transmutation of the idea of lesbianism in Western literature, spanning five centuries."
Matthew Breen, Out.com

"Wonderfully elucidating."
Edmund White, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"One of the great pleasures of reading this anthology is the opportunity to eavesdrop on Castle talking to herself. Her usual wry wit is present everywhere . . . [The Literature of Lesbianism] shows not what has been written by lesbians but what has been written about them. For this alone it is uniquely valuable. . . . If I could have but one volume of lesbian literature, this would be the one."
Lorallee MacPike, Lambda Book Report

"The Literature of Lesbianism is an invitation to explore a vast array of offerings that demonstrate the richness of the lesbian literary heritage."
Girlfriends Magazine

"It's hard to decide what's more amazing: the astonishing (and often unpredictable) range of attitudes, the range of writers included."
Books to Watch Out For Newsletter

"This anthology is quite simply magnificent, and no one but Terry Castle could have produced it. The magisterial introduction is a major essay, almost a monograph, massively learned, profoundly original, challenging and compelling. The selection of works is both generous and revelatory, including much excellent unfamiliar material, and a number of real surprises. This will be an essential volume for anyone interested not only in the history of women, and of sexuality, but in the complex energies of literature itself."
Stephen Orgel, Stanford University

"A treasure-trove for lovers of literature and of lesbians."
Susan Gubar, author of Critical Condition: Feminism at the Turn of the Century

Since the Renaissance, countless writers have been magnetized by the notion of love between women. From Renaissance love poems to twentieth-century novels, plays, and short stories, The Literature of Lesbianism brings together hundreds of literary works on the subject of female homosexuality. This is not an anthology of "lesbian writers." Nor is it simply a one-sided compendium of "positive" or "negative" images of lesbian experience. Terry Castle explores the emergence and transformation of the "idea of lesbianism": its conceptual origins and how it has been transmitted, transformed, and collectively embellished over the past five centuries.

Both male and female authors are represented here and they display an astonishing and often unpredictable range of attitudes. Some excoriate female same-sex love; some eulogize it. Some are salacious or satiric; others sympathetic and confessional. Yet what comes across everywhere is just how visible as a literary theme Sapphic love has always been in Western literature. As Castle demonstrates, it is hardly the taboo or forbidden topic we sometimes assume it to be, but has in fact been a central preoccupation for many of our greatest writers, past and present.

Beginning with an excerpt from Ariosto's comic epic poem, Orlando Furioso, the anthology progresses chronologically through the next five centuries, presenting selections from Shakespeare, John Donne, Katherine Philips, Aphra Behn, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, Alexander Pope, the Marquis de Sade, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Dickinson, Guy de Maupassant, Henry James, Willa Cather, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Nella Larsen, Colette, and Graham Greene, among many others. It also includes some anonymous works, several published here for the first time, as well as numerous translations from the writers of antiquity, such as Sappho, Ovid, Martial, and Juvenal, whose rediscovery in the early Renaissance helped shape subsequent Western literary representations of female homosexuality.

Terry Castle's great-uncle, Rifleman Lewis Newton Braddock, died in the First World War. In Courage, Mon Amie, she describes a long-contemplated trip to the Western Front on a 'modest, conventional and somewhat anorakish' quest to locate her great-uncle's grave. She explores her own 'grim and spinsterish' war fixation, tracing her obsession as it developed from childhood: 'I became an armchair expert on Lewis guns and enfilade fire, shrapnel and mortars, wiring parties, trench raids and listening posts.... It seemed at the time, I realized, an odd obsession for a girl. But it seemed to go along with various other un-girlish things about me: my vast bebop collection and dislike of skirts.'

Boss Ladies, Watch Out! brings together in a convenient format Terry Castle's most scintillating recent essays on literary criticism, women's writing and sexuality. Readers of Castle's many books and reviews already know her as one of the most incisive and witty critics writing today. The articles collected in Boss Ladies constitute an extended meditation--both learned and personal--on just what it means to be a Female Critic. In the book's opening essays Castle examines how women became critics in the first place--scandalously at times--in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. She explores in particular Jane Austen's "talismanic" role in the establishment of a female critical tradition. In the second part of the book, Castle embraces, with gusto, the role of Female Critic herself. In lively reconsiderations of Sappho, Bronte, Cather, Colette, Gertrude Stein, and many other great women writers--"Boss Ladies" all--Castle pays a moving and civilized tribute to female genius and intellectual daring.

"Argues that the novelist Radclyffe Hall and the playwright/actor Noel Coward, despite dramatic differences in age, temperament, prose style and persona, were friends who haunted each others lives, wardrobes and work. Other scholars have noted their connection, but Castle is the first to explore the relationship and its literary implications. . . . By bringing the seemingly opposite Hall and Coward together, she makes her case especially dramatically."
The Nation

"Breaking ranks with lesbian separatists prominent since the 1970s, the author uses Hall and Coward to demonstrate the rich yet neglected cultural relationships that have existed between gay men and lesbians in England and America since the turn of the century. . . . An accessibly written, fascinating treatment of its subject."
Choice

"An illuminating account of the relationship between two of twentieth-century homosexual history's most striking literary personalities. This rich little book draws attention to the sometimes-neglected crossover between lesbian and gay male culture in this century. Lively, thought-provoking, well-researched-and a great read!"

Marjorie Garber, author of Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life.

Nominated for the PEN/Spielvogel-Diamonstein Award for the Art of the Essay, 1996.

The work of leading scholar Terry Castle features essays on phantasmagoria in eighteenth-century literature and culture. Taking as her emblem the fanciful "female thermometer", an imaginary instrument invented by eighteenth-century satirists to measure levels of female sexual arousal, Castle explores the ways in which the rationalist imperative of the age paradoxically worked to produce the "impinging strangeness" of the eighteenth-century imagination.

"Castle covers new ground by challenging Michel Foucault, Lillian Faderman, and other social constructionists who have insisted . . . that there were no lesbians before 1900. . . . Her work is always engaging [and] consistently fascinating."
New York Times Book Review

From Kirkus Reviews
Lively essays (some previously published in the Kenyon Review, etc.) on the representation of lesbians in literature and history. Readers acquainted with gay history will be on familiar ground here, since Castle (English/Stanford; author of the scholarly Masquerade and Civilization, 1986, etc.) includes the likes of Greta Garbo, The Bostonians, and The Well of Loneliness among her subjects. Her thesis is that lesbians have been ``ghosted''--made into apparitions, visible but not quite present--throughout history, and she finds numerous examples of homosexual women being described as ``spectral'' or, like The Well of Loneliness's Stephen Gordon, as ``earthbound spirits.'' Castle's ``ghosting'' looks suspiciously like a fancier wording for the well-explored phenomenon of ``lesbian invisibility,'' but the author (who's openly gay) infuses new life into the concept by underlining various characters' feistiness and ``gaiety'' rather than their victimization. But Castle often reads too much between the lines: One would never guess that The New Yorker's Janet Flanner was a lesbian simply by studying her articles. Moreover, she sometimes misreads other historians or literary critics: Lillian Faderman's claim, for instance, that the nineteenth-century English "Ladies of Llangollen" lacked a ``lesbian consciousness'' somehow becomes a straw man that the author dubs the ``no-sex-before-1900 school.'' But Castle's forte--the use of examples from her own life--underlines her points and makes her concluding chapter, ``In Praise of Brigitte Fassbaender (A Musical Emanation),'' her best, as she deftly mixes autobiographical revelation and literary theory while analyzing female fans of operatic divas, in a kind of lesbian equivalent of Wayne Koestenbaum's The Queen's Throat ... Castle's blend of solid research and clear, accessible prose may win her an enthusiastic readership. (Thirty illustrations) -- Copyright 1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.--

Public masquerades were a popular and controversial form of urban entertainment in England for most of the eighteenth century. They were held regularly in London and attended by hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people from all ranks of society who delighted in disguising themselves in fanciful costumes and masks and moving through crowds of strangers. The author shows how the masquerade played a subversive role in the eighteenth-century imagination, and that it was persistently associated with the crossing of class and sexual boundaries, sexual freedom, the overthrow of decorum, and urban corruption. Authorities clearly saw it as a profound challenge to social order and often sought to suppress it.

The book is in two parts. In the first, Castle recreates the historical phenomenon of the English masquerade: the makeup of the crowds, the symbolic language of costume, and the various codes of verbal exchange, gesture, and sexual behavior.

The second part analyzes contemporary literary representations of the masquerade, using novels by Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Frances Burney, and Elizabeth Inchbald to show how the masquerade in fiction reflected the disruptive power it had in contemporary life. It also served as an indispensable plot catalyst, generating the complications out of which the central drama of the fiction emerged. An epilogue discusses the use of the masquerade as a literary device after the eighteenth century.

The writer and critic Terry Castle--described by Susan Sontag as "the most expressive, most enlightening literary critic at large today"-- has taught at Stanford University since 1983. Her scholarly interests include eighteenth-century British fiction, the Gothic novel, Jane Austen, the First World War, English art and culture of the 1920s and 1930s, autobiography and biography, and gay and lesbian writing. She has published eight books on diverse subjects, including Masquerade and Civilization (1986), The Apparitional Lesbian (1993), and the prize-winning collection, The Literature of Lesbianism: A Historical Anthology from Ariosto to Stonewall (2003). She is also a well-known essayist and has written frequently for the London Review of Books, Atlantic, New Republic, Times Literary Supplement, New York Times Book Review, and other periodicals. In 1997 she was named Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities at Stanford.

In her spare time, she is a visual artist, music and book collector, and miniature dachshund enthusiast. She lives in San Francisco.

When Clarissa, in Samuel Richardson's epistolary masterpiece, writes of Lovelace, 'I am but a cipher, to give him significance, and myself pain,' that sentence evokes a startling image that not only epitomizes their relationship but provides a key for our reading of the novel itself. All the letter writers are engaged in a continual process of interpretation, attempting, through the letters, to impose their own constructions of events on others.

As Richardson's 'exemplar to her sex,' Clarissa is the paradigmatic female victim. Terry Castle delineates the ways in which, in a world where only voice carries authority, Clarissa is repeatedly silenced, both metaphorically and literally. 'Authority' in the novel derives from what Lovelace calls 'force'--a capacity to brutalize. The epistolary text mimics the underlying semantic struggle between Lovelace and Clarissa so that her rape serves as the physical counterpart to the semantic violations she has already suffered. A victim of physical assault, she is first a victim of hermeneutic abuse. Lovelace's interpretations are legitimized by force; Clarissa's interpretations carry no weight.

Have readers' views of Clarissa been conditioned by the novel's internal dynamics of construction and force? Drawing on feminist criticism and recent hermeneutic theory, Castle examines the question of authority in the novel. By tracing the patterns of abuse and exploitation which occur when meanings are arbitrarily and violently imposed, she explores the sexual politics of reading as it relates to the characters of the novel, and shows its implications for the novel's readers.

From THE LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS

"Desperately Seeking Susan" (on Susan Sontag) 17 March 2005
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n06/cast01_.html

"Love-of-One's-Life-Department" (on Natalie Clifford Barney and Renee Vivien) 21 October 2004
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n20/cast01_.html

"Seductress Extraordinaire" (on Mercedes de Acosta and Greta Garbo) 24 June 2004
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n12/cast01_.html

"My Heroin Christmas" (on Art Pepper) 5 December 2003 (not available online)

"Courage, Mon Amie" (on the First World War) 4 April 2002
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v24/n07/cast01_.html

"Pipe Down Back There!" (on Willa Cather) 14 December 2000
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v22/n06/cast01_.html

"Yes You Sweetheart" (on Colette) 16 March 2000
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v22/n06/cast01_.html

"Always the Bridesmaid" (on Sappho) 20th Anniversary Issue 30 September 1999
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v21/n19/cast01_.html

"Boss Ladies, Watch Out" (on Lillian Hellman) 15 April 1999
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v21/n19/cast01_.html

"If Everybody Had a Wadley" (on "Joe" Carstairs) 5 March 1998
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v20/n05/cast01_.html

From THE ATLANTIC:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/200401/castle

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/200409/castle

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/200506/castle

Cervantes: “High Plains Drifter,” The Atlantic, January/February 2004.
Cole Porter: “Night and Day,” The New Republic, December 21, 1998.
Joe Carstairs: “If Everybody Had a Wadley,” London Review of Books, 5 March 1998.
Casanova: “Boogie Nights.” The New Republic, 3 November 1997.
19th-Century Spiri"tualism: “Flournoy’s Complaint.” London Review of Books, 23 May 1996.
Charlotte Brontë: “Hush Hush, Sweet Charlotte.” The New Republic, 22 January 1996.
Jane Austen: “Sister-Sister.” London Review of Books, 2 August 1995. Rpt. with
accompanying article in Lingua Franca, September/October 1995; and in Jane Hindle, ed., London Review of Books: An Anthology, 138-48. London and New York: Verso, 1996.
History of Sexuality: “Sex Please--We’re British.” The New Republic, 5 June 1995.
Eliza Fenwick and 18th-Century Women’s Writing: “Sublimely Bad.” London Review of
Books, 23 February 1995.
Sylvia Townsend Warner: “The Will to Whimsy.” Times Literary Supplement, 3 June 1994.
Gertrude Stein: “Very Fine is My Valentine.” Times Literary Supplement, 18 February 1994.
Lesbian Writing: “Love Between Women.” Times Literary Supplement, 27 August 1993.
The Brontës: “Another Brontë Country.” Times Literary Supplement, 10 January 1992.
Janet Flanner: “An Americaine in Paris.” The New Republic, 26 March, 1990.
18th-Century Bluestockings: “Learned Ladies.” Times Literary Supplement, Dec. 14-20, 1990.
18th-Century Women’s Poetry: “Unruly and Unresigned.” Times Literary Supplement, Nov.
10-16, 1989.
Lesbian Writing: “Pursuing the Amazonian Dream.” Times Literary Supplement, June 2-8,
1989.

On Colette:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v22/n06/cast01_.html

Collage and Gouaches

Recent Self-Portraits