A Conversation with Janet Todd

Jane Austen and Shelley in the Garden: A Novel with Pictures by Janet Todd

Join us in our library at 7pm on Wednesday 13th April , when guests can meet acclaimed Austen scholar and author Janet Todd and hear about her book, Jane Austen and Shelley in the Garden: A Novel with Pictures.

Jane Austen is a presence for thousands of readers; some even look to her for guidance in their lives. This novel investigates three women, one of whom channels Jane Austen. A "coming of old age" novel, it is a light meditation on aging, literature, friendship, hope, and the joy of new opportunities. The story includes interchanges with Jane Austen, along with a Shelley twist. Advance readers have hailed it as dazzling and inventive and it features literary criticism as well as history.

Janet Todd is a novelist, biographer and internationally renowned Jane Austen scholar. She is a former president of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge. Now a full-time writer and literary critic, she has recently published Jane Austen's Sanditon, Don't You Know There's a War On? Radiation Diaries, Aphra Behn: A Secret Life, and A Man of Genius. She is an Emerita Professor at the University of Aberdeen and an Honorary Fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge. Born in Wales, she grew up in Britain, Bermuda and Ceylon/Sri Lanka and has worked at universities in Ghana, Puerto Rico, India, the US (Rutgers, Florida) Scotland (Glasgow, Aberdeen) and England (UEA, Cambridge). She lives in Cambridge, England.