About the Author

Terry Castle is Professor of English at Stanford University. She is the author of The Apparitional Lesbian (1993) and editor of the Oxford's forthcoming The Literature of Lesbianism: A Historical Anthology.

Reviews

"The Female Thermometer is filled with incisive observations that make us re-examine the broad preconceptions we hold about the 18th century and reassess some of its specific cultural artifacts."--The New York Times
"Lively new study of 18th-century culture....Intriguing book."--International Herald Tribune
"This is an attractive and important book....There is no essay in this book that isn't a pleasure to read, and none that isn't at the same time supported...by extensive and wide-ranging documentation."--Times Literary Supplement
"The whole collection is informed not only by Castle's wide-ranging erudition... but by her wit and her persuasive and intriguing interpretations. ...she can always take her argument one step further, adding one more turn to the screw. This is a book to be read by specialists in the different authors--Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Radcliffe--as well as savoured by those interested in eighteenth-century culture and the history of the spectral
idea."--Eighteenth-Century Fiction
"Terry Castle is well equipped to explore the dark Other of the age of enlightenment, as her book on masquerade demonstrated. Her knowledge of the back alleys and "no trespassing" byways of the culture is minute and particular; and she can not only produce out-of-the-way facts and figures, publications and performances, but she can brilliantly and convincingly articulate their significance for the culture."--ighteenth-Century Fiction
"The Female Thermometer is filled with incisive observations that make us re-examine the broad preconceptions we hold about the 18th century and reassess some of its specific cultural artifacts."--The New York Times
"Lively new study of 18th-century culture....Intriguing book."--International Herald Tribune
"This is an attractive and important book....There is no essay in this book that isn't a pleasure to read, and none that isn't at the same time supported...by extensive and wide-ranging documentation."--Times Literary Supplement
"The whole collection is informed not only by Castle's wide-ranging erudition... but by her wit and her persuasive and intriguing interpretations. ...she can always take her argument one step further, adding one more turn to the screw. This is a book to be read by specialists in the different authors--Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Radcliffe--as well as savoured by those interested in eighteenth-century culture and the history of the spectral
idea."--Eighteenth-Century Fiction
"Terry Castle is well equipped to explore the dark Other of the age of enlightenment, as her book on masquerade demonstrated. Her knowledge of the back alleys and "no trespassing" byways of the culture is minute and particular; and she can not only produce out-of-the-way facts and figures, publications and performances, but she can brilliantly and convincingly articulate their significance for the culture."--ighteenth-Century Fiction
"Admirers of Castle's work can encounter old friends such as her groundbreaking essay (updated here) on Fielding's The Female Husband and her cultural analysis of the carnivalesque in eighteenth-century masquerade."--Signs
"The Female Thermometer is a delight to read..."--Modern Philology
"...Castle is our best historian of desire, and, as such, she is one of those responsible for the renovation of this business, making it new and exciting."--Studies in English Literature 1500-1900