Janet Todd

Janet Todd has been thinking and writing about books for more than half a century. She has been a biographer, novelist, editor, memoirist and critic of English and French literature.

In the 1970s, Janet helped open up the study of early women writers in English by beginning a journal and compiling encyclopaedias before editing the complete works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Aphra Behn and Jane Austen. She also wrote biographies of these writers, as well as of Mary Wollstonecraft's daughters, Fanny and Mary Shelley, and her aristocratic Irish pupil, Lady Mount Cashell. In recent years Janet has written novels, most set in Venice, her most recent one being 'Jane Austen and Shelley in the Garden'. She has also continued her critical engagement with Jane Austen. For this anniversary year, she compiled for Cambridge University Press an 8-volume edition of Austen's works including childhood writings and manuscript fragments, aimed at the general reader; she also wrote a companion book crossing memoir and criticism: 'Living with Jane Austen'.

Janet has worked in English departments in Africa, the West Indies, the US and the UK. She was the seventh President of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, and is now an Honorary Fellow of Lucy Cavendish and Newnham Colleges. She is a Professor Emerita of the University of Aberdeen.