Janet Todd

Janet Margaret Todd is a Welsh-born academic and a well-respected author of many books on women writers and the depiction of women in literature. Todd was educated at Cambridge University and the University of Florida, where she undertook a doctorate on the poet John Clare. She has worked in universities in Ghana (Cape Coast), Puerto Rico (Mayaguez), North America (New Brunswick), India (New Delhi), England (Norwich) and Scotland (Glasgow); she is an Emerita Professor of English Literature at the University of Aberdeen. From 2008 to 2015 she was president of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge and is an Honorary Fellow of the College and of Newnham College. She is now a full-time novelist and researcher living in Cambridge.

Janet 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 (with Marilyn Butler) 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.