Janet Todd

JANET TODD was born in Wales and raised in England, Scotland, Bermuda and Sri Lanka—with many intervals in Wales. She has worked in Ghana, Puerto Rico, India, England and Scotland. In the US from 1968, at the University of Florida and Rutgers in New Jersey, she was active in the feminist movement and compiled an encyclopaedia of early women writers, then neglected but happily now much better known. Janet has published on many authors from Samuel Richardson to Lord Byron and has written biographies of Aphra Behn, Mary Wollstonecraft, her Irish aristocratic pupils and her daughters, Mary Shelley and Fanny, the subject of ‘Death and the Maidens’. Two of Janet’s three published novels feature fictional writers and the search for writers: 'A Man of Genius' and ‘Jane Austen and Shelley in the Garden’ about a woman haunted by Jane Austen and a quest to find the dead baby daughter of the Shelleys in Venice. Her other novel ‘Don’t You Know There’s a War on’, her darkest work, draws on memoires of dismal post-war England.

Janet has faced many illnesses and is fascinated by how the mind copes with a recalcitrant body. While undergoing cancer treatment, she wrote a diary which caught snatches of poems and much-read novels as they flashed (often absurdly) through her mind during treatment. Also a memoir of her peripatetic childhood, it was published as ‘Radiation Diaries’.

Recently Janet has revisited her intellectual past through her readings of Jane Austen’s extraordinary novels over many decades and cultures: ‘Living with Jane Austen’. To celebrate the 250th anniversary of her birth, she has edited a new (beautiful!) edition of the novels for Cambridge University Press, together with Austen’s boisterous and brilliant childhood writing and all her manuscript works—including her comic poems.

A Professor Emerita at the University of Aberdeen and Honorary Fellow of Newnham College, Janet is a former President of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, where she established the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize. She lives in Cambridge and is learning to love fens and slow-moving rivers.