Fanny Price, in Mansfield Park, tells her persistent suitor that 'we have all a better guide in ourselves...than any other person can be'. Sometimes, however, we crave external guidance: and when this happens we could do worse than seek it in Jane Austen's own subtle novels. Written to coincide with Austen's 250th birthday, this approachable and intimate work shows why and how - for over half a century - Austen has inspired and challenged its author through different phases of her life. Pa...

The Second World War is over. England is losing its empire, world status and old elite values. The Empire strikes back with mass immigration, while the government soothes its people with welfare, the NHS, televisions and refrigerators. At the centre of the novel is the contemptuous Joan Kite, at odds with all the changes imposed on the country in the post war period. Shut up in a house with her only daughter, she refuses to compromise and adapt, pouring vitriol on anyone who seeks to enter...

'Fascinating scholarship. Todd conveys Behn's vivacious character and the mores of the time' New York Times'All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn; for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds,' said Virginia Woolf. Yet that tomb, in Westminster Abbey, records one of the few uncontested facts about this Restoration playwright, poet of the erotic and bisexual, political propagandist, novelist and spy: the date of her death,...

The combination of Mary Wollstonecraft works, with her efforts to live a revolutionary inner and outer life has no equal. In her richly detailed, all-encompassing biography of the first major feminist in England, Mary Wollstonecraft, Janet Todd highlights her intellectual and sexual dilemmas, her glamorous and tumultuous life and loves.Since the first publication of Mary Wollstonecraft: A revolutionary Life in2000, further historical evidence has been discovered – ...

A must-read for any devotee of Jane Austen, Janet Todd's 'naughty-Austen' reimagining of the epistolary novel Lady Susan will capture your literary imagination and get your heart racing.Austen's only anti-heroine, Lady Susan, is a beautiful, charming widow who has found herself, after the death of her husband, in a position of financial instability and saddled with an unmarried, clumsy and over-sensitive daughter. Faced with the unpalatable prospect of having to spend her w...

"Strange and haunting, a gothic novel with a modern consciousness." -Philippa Gregory"A haunting, sophisticated story about a woman discovering the truth about herself and the elusive, possibly illusive, nature of genius." - Sunday Times"Mesmerizing, haunting, imbued with a complete sense of historical verisimilitude" - Times Literary Supplement"A psychologically haunting and disturbing tale as full of mystery, exotic foreign places, and questions ...

1816 was the fateful year when the Romantic poet Shelley and his lover Mary shared a hectic creative and sexual menage in Switzerland with Lord Byron. This intense period drew from the men some of the greatest poetry of the age; from Mary, it elicited the seminal figures of Frankenstein and his Creature. But for other women close to Shelley it was a time of tragedy. At the heart of the story are Fanny Wollstonecraft and Harriet Westbrook, women whose lives were literally overwhelmed by him...

Radiation Diaries tells of a month of radiotherapy treatment undergone when Janet Todd was president of a Cambridge college and while her father, in his 100th year, was approaching death, with skin cancer. The day-by-day treatment brought into her mind flashes from her early life in Bermuda and Ceylon with her father, in Ghana and Puerto Rico, as a young woman, along with stored poems from childhood. Written each morning and night, it tells of the terror she induced in herself with insomni...

Both men and women took part in the education debate that culminated in the 1790s with Wollstonecraft, More and Edgeworth, but positions and arguments were laid down long before by Fordyce, Gregory, Gisbourne, West, Macaulay and Chapone, as featured in this text.

Jane Austen is unique among British novelists in maintaining her popular appeal while receiving more scholarly attention now than ever before. This introduction by Janet Todd, leading scholar and editor of Austen's work, explains what students need to know about her novels, life, context and reception. Each novel is discussed in detail, and the essential information is given about her life and literary influences, her novels and letters, and her impact on later literature. For this second ...

They were known as the Ascendancy, the dashing aristocratic elite that controlled Irish politics and society at the end of the eighteenth century—and at their pinnacle stood Caroline and Robert King, Lord and Lady Kingsborough of Mitchelstown Castle. Heirs to ancient estates and a vast fortune, Lord and Lady Kingsborough appeared to be blessed with everything but marital love—which only made the scandal that tore through their family more shocking. In 1798, at the height of a rebellion tha...

Eccentric Fran wants a second chance. Thanks to her intimacy with Jane Austen, and the poet Shelley, she finds one.Jane Austen is such a presence in Fran's life that she seems to share her cottage and garden, becoming an imaginary friend.Fran’s conversations with Jane Austen guide and chide her – but Fran is ready for change after years of teaching, reading and gardening. An encounter with a long-standing English friend, and an American writer, lea...