(About)

The writer and critic Terry Castle–described by the late 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. Her latest book, The Professor and Other Writings will be published by HarperCollins in January 2010. 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.