Terry Castle (born October 18, 1953) is an American literary scholar. Once described by Susan Sontag as "the most expressive, most enlightening literary critic at large today," she has published eight books, including the anthology ''The Literature of Lesbianism'', which won the Lambda Literary Editor's Choice Award. She writes on topics ranging from 18th-century ghost stories to

World War I World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...

-era lesbianism to the so-called "photographic fringe." The daughter of British parents, Castle was born in

San Diego San Diego ( , ; ) is a city on the Pacific Ocean coast of Southern California located immediately adjacent to the Mexico–United States border. With a 2020 population of 1,386,932, it is the eighth most populous city in the United State ...

and lived in England and

Southern California Southern California (commonly shortened to SoCal) is a geographic and cultural region that generally comprises the southern portion of the U.S. state of California. It includes the Los Angeles metropolitan area, the second most populous urban a ...

as a child. She attended the

University of Puget Sound The University of Puget Sound (UPS or Puget Sound) is a private university in Tacoma, Washington. The university draws approximately 2,600 students from 44 states and 16 countries. It offers 1,200 courses each year in more than 50 traditional an ...

and graduated in 1975 with a B.A. in English. She went on to attend the

University of Minnesota The University of Minnesota, formally the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, (UMN Twin Cities, the U of M, or Minnesota) is a public land-grant research university in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, Minnesota, United States. ...

to get her Ph.D. in English. A longtime resident of

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17th ...

, Castle is currently Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University. Her wife is Blakey Vermeule, also a professor at Stanford. Starting around 2000, Castle increasingly began to write more widely and on personal topics beyond her academic career, writing that "having labored in the dusty groves of academe for over twenty years, I felt—as a new millennium unfolded—a desire to write more directly and personally than had previously been the case." Her essays appear frequently in the '' London Review of Books,'' the ''

Atlantic The Atlantic Ocean is the second-largest of the world's five oceans, with an area of about . It covers approximately 20% of Earth's surface and about 29% of its water surface area. It is known to separate the " Old World" of Africa, Europe an ...

,'' and the '' New Republic.''

Bibliography

* ''Clarissa's Ciphers: Meaning and Disruption in Richardson's 'Clarissa (1982) * ''Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction'' (1986) * ''The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture'' (1993) * ''The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny'' (1995) * ''Noel Coward and Radclyffe Hall: Kindred Spirits'' (1996) * ''Boss Ladies, Watch Out! Essays on Women, Sex, and Writing'' (2002) * ''Courage, Mon Amie'' (2002) * ''The Literature of Lesbianism: A Historical Anthology From Ariosto to Stonewall'' (2003) * ''The Professor and Other Writings'' (2010) (Republished as ''The Professor: A Sentimental Education. ).

References

External links

Terry Castle's websiteTerry Castle's blogTerry Castle Interviewed on "The 7th Avenue Project" Radio Show
- London Review of Books
Travels with My Mom
- London Review of Books {{DEFAULTSORT:Castle, Terry Living people Stanford University Department of English faculty 1953 births University of Minnesota College of Liberal Arts alumni University of Puget Sound alumni American lesbian writers Vermeule family LGBT academics