Janet Todd


Janet Margaret Todd OBE is a British academic and author. She was educated at Cambridge University and the University of Florida, where she undertook a doctorate on the poet John Clare. Much of her work concerns Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, and their circles.

Career

Academic career

She has worked in universities in Ghana, Puerto Rico, North America, India, England.
She was appointed professor of English Literature at Glasgow University in 2000, and was then at Aberdeen University from 2004 until she took up in 2008 the post of president of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, from which she retired in 2015. She is now a full-time novelist and researcher living in Cambridge. She is a Honorary Fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge.

Author

Todd's writing concerns literature and culture of the Restoration and eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Over a long career she has published more than 35 critical and biographical books and collections of essays, mainly on women authors, women's writing, cultural history and the development of fiction. She has edited full-scale editions of Mary Wollstonecraft and Aphra Behn, as well as individual works of women such as Charlotte Smith, Helen Maria Williams, Mary Shelley, Mary Carleton and Eliza Fenwick.
She is the General Editor of the nine-volume The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen, editor of the volume Jane Austen in Context, and co-editing Persuasion and Later Manuscripts and author of the Cambridge Introduction to Jane Austen. In the US she started the first journal devoted to women writers and more recently in the UK she has been the co-founder with Marie Mulvey-Roberts of Women's Writing.
Since retirement she has revised The Secret Life of Aphra Behn and published two novels, A Man of Genius
, and an Austen spinoff, Lady Susan Plays the Game. In 2018, she published Radiation Diaries, a frank and scholarly account of a month of radiotherapy treatment.

Honours

In the 2013 New Year Honours, Todd was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire "for services to higher education and literary scholarship".

Selected publications