Terry Castle (born October 18, 1953) is an American literary scholar. Once described by Susan Sontag as "the most expressive, most enlightening literary critic at large today," she has published eight books, including the anthology The Literature of Lesbianism, which won the Lambda Literary Editor's Choice Award. She writes on topics ranging from 18th-century ghost stories to World War I era lesbianism to the so-called "photographic fringe." Her essays appear regularly in the London Review of Books, the Atlantic, and the New Republic.
The daughter of British parents, Castle was born in San Diego and lived in England and Southern California as a child. She attended the University of Puget Sound and graduated in 1975 with a B.A. in English. She went on to attend the University of Minnesota to get her Ph.D. in English.
A longtime resident of San Francisco, Castle is currently Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University.