Author of the week: Terry Castle

last updated 8 January 2015

Literary critic Terry Castle waited 35 years before publishing a long story about an affair she had with an older female professor. She isn’t sure why she waited, or why she revealed it now, said Christine Smallwood in The Nation. “Perhaps my therapist could answer better than I can,” says the 56-year-old lesbian scholar. Waiting for the perspective that comes with age might be one explanation. The novella-length title essay in Castle’s new book, The Professor and Other Writings, revisits the young woman Castle was in the early 1970s and happily pokes fun at her. “I felt myself in that period to have been such an idiot,” she says. “It took a while to realize I could describe my own idiocy and it might be interesting to people.”

Castle, whom the late Susan Sontag once called “the most expressive, most enlightening literary critic at large today,” has clearly tired of writing only criticism, said Jed Lipinski in Salon.com. “Much of what passes for advanced literary scholarship these days is dreadful twaddle—incoherent, emotionally empty, deeply illiterate,” says Castle, who is now a professor of English at Stanford University. Writing about herself also offered her a chance to make a contribution to one of her true passions. “I love literary gossip. I love it,” she says. “I’m always, in principle, more interested in openness and explicitness than in being, I don’t know, kind of prim about it.”