Bringing insight and elan to legacy of women writers

The fist-in-your-face title of this essay collection by literary critic Terry Castle comes from “Terror in the Vineyard,” a review of Rosemary Mahoney’s scathing memoir of the summer she worked as a teenage housemaid to the aging, bad-tempered Lillian Hellman: “When slave girls rebel, boss ladies, watch out!” declares Castle, who goes on to fault Mahoney for having written a book richer in spite than insight.

Castle’s sympathy for the “boss lady” is not so much for Lillian Hellman, the employer of domestic help, as for Hellman the woman who successfully asserted her authority as a writer. Castle asserts that women who venture into the traditionally male preserve of criticism have had to struggle to overcome not only male hostility but also their own inhibitions.

Yet, as Castle also maintains, women have managed to succeed quite brilliantly in finding ways to exert their intellectual and moral authority, from the 18th century bluestockings and salon leaders to the imposing roster of 20th century critics that includes Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, Simone de Beauvoir, Hannah Arendt, Marguerite Yourcenar and Susan Sontag.

Castle defines “critic” broadly to mean not only literary critics, such as Elizabeth Hardwick and Hellman’s nemesis Mary McCarthy, but also political thinkers such as Mary Wollstonecraft and, most interestingly of all, novelists such as Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot, whose fiction coruscates with their critical intelligence and keen judgments.

Castle, a San Diego native who teaches at Stanford and contributes frequently to the London Review of Books, wryly notes that, because of her ambiguous first name, readers often mistake her for a man, sometimes even accusing her of male chauvinism. Thanks in part to her penchant -- or to the London Review of Books’ penchant -- for attention-grabbing titles, Castle gained brief notoriety in 1995 for suggesting that Jane Austen’s most important emotional relationship may have been with her older sister.

An expanded version of that piece, “Was Jane Austen Gay?,” can be found in this collection. And, yes, Castle did speculate that Austen may have had unconscious homoerotic feelings for her elder sister (“I take it as a psychological given,” she explains, “that parental and sibling attachments have an erotic dimension”), but no, she did not suggest that Austen acted out such feelings or even thought of them in such terms.

“Was Jane Austen Gay?” and “Terror in the Vineyard” are two of the 14 lively reviews that make up the second section of this book. Unlike some Austen fans (and Castle is a tremendous admirer of Austen’s genius), this “Jane-ite” is equally appreciative of the Brontes, including the too-often-maligned Charlotte. Not only does she defend Charlotte against her carping biographer Juliet Barker; she also directs our attention to the seldom-recognized “dazzling, almost visionary grandiosity” of Charlotte’s juvenilia.

Even more mind-expanding are the six longer essays in the first section, which treat some of Castle’s central themes in greater depth. Everyone knows that “Emma” is a triumph of wit and irony, but as Castle astutely points out, defending Austen against those who mistake her for a dry, snobbish maiden lady, “Emma” also has great emotional appeal:

“The ironic distance set up between reader and character is never so great as to become estranging.... ‘Emma’ has to be one of the least alienating fictions ever written. Reading it, we are constantly being lassoed by feeling. Perhaps the greatest triumph of Austen’s method is that without ever compromising her satiric spirit ... she is able to produce such consistently powerful emotional effects.”

Turning to “Northanger Abbey,” Castle sees it not only as a satire of the gothic novel, so wildly popular in those days, but also as an example of a novelist using fiction as a means of moral and cultural criticism. In addition to having second thoughts about her penchant for gothic fiction, what the heroine finally comes to recognize is “the inexcusability of not thinking for oneself.”

Castle casts a cool eye on the recent revival of interest in the gothic. “I know that as I subside onto my deathbed,” she remarks in deliciously mock 18th century style, “I shall no doubt regret the many long evenings spent ploughing through ‘The Mysteries of Udolpho’ and ‘Melmoth the Wanderer.’ I could have been listening to Haydn, reading Proust or Musil, [or] playing with my dog.” But the fruits of her labor are splendidly evident in her essay “The Gothic Novel,” in which she insightfully explores its strengths, weaknesses, the reasons behind its wide appeal and why it is ultimately a severely limited and repressive genre.

Speaking of repression, Castle has some tart words for the vainglorious womanizer Casanova: “The great imaginative discovery of the 18th century was, after all, female inwardness.” At the very moment when such women as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Julie de Lespinasse, Mary Wollstonecraft and Germaine de Stael were examining their hopes, fears, needs and desires, and asserting their right to make judgments, Casanova presented women as if they lacked even the basic elements of individuality.

Castle’s immersion in great 18th and 19th century writers such as Samuel Richardson, Austen and the Brontes has clearly sharpened her own critical faculties and contributed more than a little to her engaging style and elan. She is generally so discerning that it comes as a shock to find her waxing effusive over the mind-numbing fatuities of Gertrude Stein. Castle actually compares her to Montaigne! (Well, both did live in France and enjoy summers in the countryside.) But why would we want to read the tedious Stein when we could be savoring “Emma,” listening to another of Castle’s favorites, Cole Porter, or leafing through a scintillating collection of essays like this one?