The Professor and Other Writings

2010

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Publisher

Harper Collins

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Stanford professor and longtime contributor to the London Review of Books, the Atlantic, the New Republic, Slate, and other publications, Terry Castle is widely admired for the wit, panache, intellectual breadth, and emotional honesty of her writings on life, literature, and art. Now, at long last, she has collected some of the more personal of her recent essays in a single volume. Several pieces here are already acknowledged classics: "Desperately Seeking Susan," the celebrated account she wrote in 2005 of her droll and somewhat bittersweet friendship with Susan Sontag; "My Heroin Christmas," a darkly humorous examination of addiction, her family and stepsiblings, and the late, great jazz saxophonist Art Pepper; and the picaresque "Travels with My Mother," a rollicking travelogue that brings together Castle's complicated relationship with her mother, lesbianism, art, and the difficult yet transcendent work of the painter Agnes Martin.

At the center of the collection, however, is the title work, published here for the first time: a candid and wrenching exploration of Castle's relationship, during her graduate school years, with a female professor. At once hilarious and rueful, it is a pitch-perfect recollection of the fiascos of youth: how we come to own (or disown) our sexuality; how we understand (or don't) the emotional needs and wishes of others; how the ordeals of desire can prompt a lifelong search for self-understanding.

In this account of a sentimental education, as in all the essays in The Professor and Other Writings, Terry Castle reveals herself as a truly remarkable writer: utterly distinctive, wise, frank, and fearless.

About the Author

Terry Castle

Terry Castle has taught English literature at Stanford since 1983. She specializes in the history of the novel, especially the works of Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, and Austen. But she has taught a wide variety of other subjects too: the literature of the First World War, British modernism, Virginia Woolf, Radclyffe Hall, and other twentieth-century women writers, psychoanalytic theory, literature and opera, and gay and lesbian writing. She has written seven books: 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), and The Professor: A Sentimental Education (2010). She is the editor of a prize-winning anthology, The Literature of Lesbianism: A Historical Anthology from Ariosto to Stonewall (2003). Several of her essays have likewise won individual prizes--including the William Riley Parker Prize awarded annually by the Modern Language Association for the best critical essay of the year. In 1995 her book The Female Thermometer was a finalist for the PEN Spielvogel-Diamondstein Award for the Art of the Essay. Her latest book, The Professor, has likewise been named as a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She writes regularly for the London Review of Books, New Republic, Atlantic, Slate, and other magazines and journals.

Castle is also a visual artist and collector of tintypes, anonymous photos, Outsider Art, vintage postcards, art zines, artists' books, and other paper ephemera. Some of her own artwork can be seen on her blog Fevered Brain Productions, INSTAGRAM,and SaatchiArt.