The Professor and Other Writings by Terry Castle - review
A brilliantly funny revenge memoir
Sat 23 Apr 2011 00.06 BST
W
riting a memoir is the best revenge, and indeed, as Terry Castle ruefully acknowledges in "The Professor", "writing . . . is often nothing but revenge". Castle is professor of English at Stanford University, and a specialist in 18th-century English literature, as well as lesbian literary theory and literary history. But in the past decade she has also become recognised as an outstanding public intellectual, memoirist and culture critic.
The vengeful side of Castle's work first came to public attention through "Desperately Seeking Susan", her essay published in the London Review of Books in March 2005, just a few months after Susan Sontag's death. Here, Castle detailed her "on-again, off-again semi-friendship" with the great woman in which she played the humble groupie to Sontag's imperious star. She served as Sontag's chauffeur around southern California, a sympathetic audience for her kvetching about academics, an eager player in her games of intellectual one-upmanship, a purveyor of lesbian gossip to her closeted but insatiably curious androgynous persona ("I've loved men, Terry, I've loved women").