Boss Ladies, Watch Out ─ Essays on Women, Sex and Writing

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, Watch Out! 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 centuries. 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.

Terry Castle has taught at Stanford since 1983. She has written five books ranging from Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth Century English Culture and Fiction to The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture. She has won several awards and was nominated for the PEN Spielvogel-Diamodstean Award for the Art of the Essay.