SOURCE: "The Apparitional Lesbian," in The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture, Columbia University Press, 1993, pp. 28-65.

In the excerpt below, Castle surveys the history of lesbianism in literature—both covert and overt—to find a connection between the presence of apparitions and the presence, or erasure, of lesbian desire.

To try to write the literary history of lesbianism is to confront, from the start, something ghostly: an impalpability, a misting over, an evaporation, or "whiting out" of possibility. Take, for example, that first (and strangest) of lesbian love stories, Daniel Defoe's The Apparition of Mrs. Veal (1706). The heroine of this spectral yarn (which Defoe presents in typically hoaxing fashion as unvarnished "fact") is one Mrs. Bargrave, who lives in Canterbury with a cruel and unfeeling husband. While lamenting her sad state one morning, Mrs. Bargrave is amazed to see her oldest and dearest friend, Mrs. Veal...