Boss Ladies, Watch Out!

"Boss Ladies Watch Out! brings together in a convenient format Terry Castle's most scintillating recent essays on literary criticism, women's writing and sexuality. Readers of Castle's many books and reviews already know her as one of the most incisive and witty critics writing today. The articles collected in "Boss Ladies constitute an extended meditation-both learned and personal-on just what it means to be a Female Critic. In the book's opening essays Castle examines how women became critics in the first place-scandalously at times--in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. She explores in particular Jane Austen's "talismanic" role in the establishment of a female critical tradition. In the second part of the book, Castle embraces, with gusto, the role of Female Critic herself. In lively reconsiderations of Sappho, Bronte, Cather, Colette, Gertrude Stein, and many other great women writers--"Boss Ladies" all--Castle pays a moving and civilized tribute to female genius and intellectual daring.