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The Secret Life of Aphra Behn
'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, novelist and spy: the date of her death, 16 April 1689. For the rest secrecy and duplicity are almost the key to her life. She loved codes, making and breaking them; writing her life becomes a decoding of a passionate but playful woman. Janet Todd draws on documents she has rediscovered in the Dutch archives, and on Behn's own writings, to tell a story of court, diplomatic and sexual intrigue, and of the rise from hum...
Don't You Know There's a War On?
Joan revisits her life, blighted by WW2, drawing her daughter into her imaginings and desires. The boundaries between them collapse.
The Cambridge Introduction to Jane Austen
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.
A Man of Genius
"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 of parentage as any penned by her protagonist." —Library Journal "Thrilling and heartbreaking, a gothic novel with emotional heart and depth." —Foreword Reviews "A darkly mischievous novel about love, obsession and the burden of charisma...
Jane Austen and Shelley in the Garden
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, leads to new possibilities. Adrift, the three women bond through a love of books and a quest for the idealist poet Shelley at two pivotal moments of his life: in Wales and Venice. His otherworldly longing and yearning for utopian communities lead the women to interrogate their own past as well as motherhood, feminism, the resurgence of childhood memory in old age, the tensions and attractions between generations. Despite the appeal of solitude, the women open themselves social to ways of living - outside partnership and family. Jane Austen, as always, has plenty of comments to offer. The novel is a (light) meditation on age, mortality, friendship, hope, and the excitement of change.
Mary Wollstonecraft
First published in 1976, this was the first comprehensive annotated bibliography of Mary Wollstonecraft’s works and most of the critical and biographical comments on her in English written between 1788 and 1975. It is designed both as a research tool for scholars and students and as a revelation of the quantity and variety of comment. The book is divided into three main chronological time periods of publication date and suggests the vagaries of Wollstonecraft’s posthumous reputation and indicates the peaks and troughs of interest. Known as an eighteenth-century British writer, philosopher, and advocate of women's rights, Mary Wollstonecraft has received much critical attention with particular interest in her unorthodox lifestyle of the time and is now regarded as one of the founding feminist philosophers.
Sensibility
The cult of sensibility jangled the nerves of Europe in the mid-eighteenth century. It touched all literary genres and brought into prominence those qualities of tenderness, compassion, sympathy and irrational benevolence associated with women by the binary psychology of the time. It privileged spontaneous emotion and found this expressed in the bodily manifestations of tears, fainting fits, flushes and palpitations. Valuing the pure victim, it took as its archetypes the innocent dying Clarissa and the benevolent, suffering man of feeling. In Sensibility, originally published in 1986, Janet Todd charts the growth and decline of sentimental writing as a privileged mode in the eighteenth centu...
Jane Austen's Sanditon
Innovative essay by leading scholar, examining the Austen phenomenon, her love of spoof and burlesque, with newly edited Sanditon text.
Jane Austen in Context
This collection of essays covering many aspects of Austen's life, works and historical context provides the fullest introduction in one volume to the life and times of Jane Austen. Jane Austen in Context is a generously illustrated collection of short, lively contributions arranged alphabetically, and covering topics from biography to portraits and agriculture to transport. An essay on the reception of Austen's work is also included, showing how criticism of Austen has responded to literary movements and fashions. The volume emphasises the subtle interactions between Austen's life and times and her novels. This is a work of reference that readers and scholars of Austen will turn to again and again.
Death and the Maidens
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 – and who both committed suicide before the year was out. "Not only a splendid work of feminist history, this is an important addition to late 18th- and early 19-century literary criticism." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
