Janet Todd's Profile

Janet Todd is President of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge University, and Herbert Grierson Professor of English at the University of Aberdeen. She is a pioneering scholar of women's writing of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and a critic and biographer of international distinction. She founded the journal Women and Literature in the 1970s and co-founded Women's Writing in the 1980. She has compiled and edited two dictionaries of British and American women writers. Among other books, she is the author of In Adam's Garden: A Study of John Clare (1973), Women's Friendship in Literature (1980), Sensibility: An Introduction (1986), Feminist Literary History (1988), The Sign of Angellica (1989), Gender, Art and Death (1993), and the biographies: Secret life of Aphra Behn (1996), Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life (2000); Daughters of Ireland (2006); and Death and the Maidens: Fanny Wollstonecraft and the Shelley Circle (2008). She has edited the complete works of Aphra Behn and, with Marilyn Butler, The Complete Works of Mary Wollstonecraft. Most recently she has been the General Editor of the nine-volume Jane Austen edition published by Cambridge University Press, as well as the editor or co-editor of 3 of the volumes. Her most recent work is the Cambridge Introduction to Jane Austen (2008). She has received awards from the NEH, American Council of Learned Societies, Guggenheim, Leverhulme Foundation, the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Huntington Library. She has held fellowships at Sidney Sussex and Newnham Colleges, Cambridge, has been president of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and has served on the English card of the Arts and Humanities Research Board.