‘Was Jane Austen gay?’ has to be one of the most provocative shouts ever to appear on the cover of a literary magazine. The London Review of Books ran it in 1995 when publicizing a review by Terry Castle. Of Austen's letters to her niece, Castle said ‘they make for rather unpleasant reading’ because of their homoerotic content: ‘the tone is giddy, sentimental and disturbingly schoolgirlish for a 42-year-old woman. Austen was infatuated with Fanny and slips often into embarrassing coquetries’. But the relationship with her sister Cassandra was where Castle found evidence of lesbianism, in part because, as their correspondence reveals, they slept together: ‘she loved and was loved by Cassandra’. Austen's interest in female clothing was evidence of ‘the close terms of physical intimacy on which she and Cassandra lived and the intense psychic "mirroring" that went on between them’.