Works by
Janet Todd
(Aka Janet Margaret Todd)
(Writer)
[September 10, 1942) - ]

Non-fiction

• Later Manuscripts of Jane Austen (2009)
  The manuscripts that survive from Jane Austen's maturity offer a unique insight into her life as a creative writer. This volume collects together, for the first time, all the literary manuscripts from Austen's adult years (with the exception of the cancelled chapters of Persuasion, in this edition printed with the finished novel), together with letters discussing the art of fiction, and her record of responses to her novels. Included here are the novella 'Lady Susan', the novel fragments of 'The Watsons' and 'Sanditon', poems and charades, and the comic 'Plan of a Novel'. In an Appendix are collected other works ascribed to Austen, including the play 'Sir Charles Grandison' and three prayers. The introduction offers a history of the manuscripts and a full account of the current state of scholarship on them, and the texts are accompanied by explanatory notes and contextual information.

• Death & the Maidens: Fanny Wollstonecraft and the Shelley Circle (2007)
  From the Romantic period's star circle, the story of its saddest casualty--Fanny Wollstonecraft, daughter of an original feminist, sister of a literary star, and hopeful object of a poet's affection, dead of suicide at the age of nineteen.
  
  Little contemporary information was written about Fanny Wollstonecraft, whose mother Mary Wollstonecraft's scandalous life scarred Fanny's possibilities before she was even born. Deserted by her father, yet reared by Mary's husband William Godwin, Fanny barely had a chance to adjust when her mother died from giving birth to the legitimate and lovely Mary. Fanny was always considered the ungainly one, the plain one, the less intelligent one. Finally her imagination was sparked by the arrival of Percy Bysshe Shelley to the Godwin household. Her infatuation was quickly shattered when Shelley, like so many before him, chose the company of her sister instead, and though Fanny bore this rejection bravely, she was never quite the same after Mary and Shelley eloped along with her step-sister Claire--who would later track down and seduce Lord Byron.
  
  Awash in a sea of sexual radicals, Fanny acted as personal assistant and go-between to this den of hedonists, shuttling information from one faction to the other, covering her sister's lies and creating fabrications of her own. She ultimately ended her life alone in a Welsh seaside hotel, an empty bottle of laudanum and an unsigned note by her side.
  
  Janet Todd's meticulously researched and brilliantly told rendering of this life give fresh and fascinating insight to the Shelley-Byron world even as it draws Fanny out of the shadows of her mother's and sister's stunning careers.

• Persuasion: The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen (2006), Antje Blank and Janet Todd, Eds.
  The accident of death makes Persuasion Jane Austen's final novel. It deserves its position by its innovative treatment of passion and rhetorical style and its development of those themes of memory and time, public and private history, inner and outer lives, language and literature, emotion and restraint that have marked all Austen's work. Where the other works move towards a new symbolic and physical home for the heroine, Persuasion begins with her ejection and ends with her understanding that home is not a place at all but an ambiance and an acceptance of change. The volume provides comprehensive explanatory notes, an extensive critical introduction covering the context and publication history of the work, a chronology of Austen's life, and an authoritative textual apparatus. This edition is an indispensable resource for all scholars and readers of Austen.

• The Cambridge Introduction to Jane Austen (2006)
  Jane Austen is unique among British novelists in maintaining her popular appeal while receiving more scholarly attention now than ever before. This innovative introduction by a leading scholar and editor of her work explains what students need to know about her novels, life, context and reception. Each novel is discussed in detail, and all the essential information about her life and literary influences, her novels and letters, and her impact on later literature and culture is covered. While the book considers the key areas of current critical focus its analysis remains thoroughly grounded in readings of the texts themselves. Janet Todd outlines what makes Austen's prose style so innovative and gives useful starting points for the study of the major works, with suggestions for further reading. This book is an essential purchase for all students of Austen, as well as for readers wanting to deepen their appreciation of the novels.

• The Cambridge Companion to Aphra Behn (2005) by Derek Hughes and Janet Todd
  Traditionally known as the first professional woman writer in English, Aphra Behn (1640-1689) has now emerged as one of the major figures of the Restoration, providing more plays for the stage than any other author and greatly influencing the development of the novel. Behn's work straddles the genres of drama, fiction, poetry and translation. With its full bibliography, detailed chronology and a description of the known facts of her life, this Companion is essential to studying her work.

• Daughters of Ireland: The Rebellious Kingsborough Sisters and the Making of a Modern Nation (2003)
  Published as Rebel Daughters: Ireland 1998 in the United States in 2003.
  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 that was setting Ireland ablaze, Robert King was tried for the murder of his wife’s cousin—a crime born of passion that proved to have extraordinary political implications. In her brilliant new book, Janet Todd unfolds the fascinating story of how this powerful Anglo-Irish family became entwined with the downfall not only of their class, but of their very way of life.
  
  Like Amanda Foreman’s bestselling Georgiana, Daughters of Ireland brings to life the world of a glittering elite in an age of international revolution. When her daughters, Margaret and Mary, were at their most impressionable, Lady Kingsborough hired the firebrand feminist Mary Wollstonecraft to be their governess, little realizing how radically this would alter both girls’ beliefs and characters. The tall, striking Margaret went on to provide crucial support to the United Irishmen in the days leading up to the Rebellion of 1798, while soft, pleasing Mary indulged in an illicit, and all but incestuous love affair that precipitated multiple tragedies.
  
  As the Kingsboroughs imploded, the most powerful and colorful figures of the day were swept up in their drama—the dashing aristocrat turned revolutionary Lord Edward Fitzgerald; the liberal, cultivated Countess of Moira, a terrible snob despite her support of Irish revolutionaires; the notorious philanderer Colonel George King, whose sexual debauchery was matched only by his appalling cruelty; Britain’s cold calculating prime minister William Pitt and its mad ruler King George III.
  
  With irresistible narrative drive and richly intimate historic detail, Daughters of Ireland an absolutely spellbinding work of history, biography, passion, and rebellion.

• The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft (2003)
  Mary Wollstonecraft is one of the most distinctive letter writers of the 18th century. She talked and thought on paper and her letters were a large part of the drama of her life. In them she grows from an awkward child of 14 to the woman of 38 facing death in childbirth. At different times they reveal her very modern desire to reconcile the irreconcilable: integrity and sexual longing, the needs and duties of a woman, motherhood and intellectual life, fame and domesticity, reason and passion. Written on the hoof in cramped lodgings or swaying boats, in the wilds of Scandinavia or freezing Paris, they form a remarkable autobiographical document. With flashes of genius, these letters are compelling reading.

• Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life (2000)

• Sense & Sensibility (1997) by Jane Austen and Janet Todd
  Jane Austen here sets social snobbery against summer picnics; social rejection against the passion of real love. Her warm portrait of the relationship between two very different sisters contrasts with her precise observation of the vanity, selfishness and snobbery of their society.

• The Secret Life of Aphra Behn (1997)
  "Because of her sensuous writing in the 17th century, wild and wonderful Aphra Behn has been a notorious figure in history. Janet Todd's new biography elaborates on the mysterious Behn and reveals her to be a complex contradiction. Her politics were High Tory, but her language was considered indecent for a woman of her times. She fought against the restraints of a patriarchal world, yet depended upon male approval. She was a lover of the easy life, but risked her life as a spy for England. Todd brings new documents from Holland and England to light, as well as discussions of Behn's entire works, in order to present this in-depth study of a most remarkable writer." -- Amazon.com

• A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1995, 2009) by Mary Wollstonecraft with Janet Todd, ed.
  This volume brings together the major political writings of Mary Wollstonecraft in the order in which they appeared in the revolutionary 1790s. It traces her passionate and indignant response to the excitement of the early days of the French Revolution and then her uneasiness at its later bloody phase. It reveals her developing understanding of women's involvement in the political and social life of the nation and her growing awareness of the relationship between politics and economics and between political institutions and the individual. In personal terms, the works show her struggling with a belief in the perfectibility of human nature through rational education, a doctrine that became weaker under the onslaught of her own miserable experience and the revolutionary massacres.

• The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing and Fiction, 1600-1800 (1992)
  Examining the writing of Aphra Behn, Frances Sheridan, Ann Radcliffe and Fanny Burney among others, this study describes the entry of women into literature as a profession in the 17th century. It describes how the fictional genre became the main vehicle for female self-expression.

• Secresy or, The Ruin on the Rock (Mothers of the Novel) (1989) by Eliza Fenwick and Janet Todd

• The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Vol. 3: Of the Importance of Religious Opinions (1989) by Mary Wollstonecraft, Janet Todd, and Marilyn Butler

• Sensibility (1986)

• A Dictionary of British and American Women Writers, 1660-1800 (1985), Janet Todd, ed.

• English Congregational Hymns in the Eighteenth Century (1982) by Madeleine Marshall and Janet Todd

See also:

• Biography - Janet M. Todd (2007)
  An article from: Contemporary Authors Online by Gale Reference Team, Digital - HTML