Coming to PBS Masterpiece Classic soon! Gorgeous, profound, delightful, useful, original, this fully illustrated, informative volume combines Jane Austen's Sanditon novel and Janet Todd's ground-breaking essay."I so enjoyed Janet Todd's beautifully produced book."Andrew Davies, screenwriter.Sanditon is Jane Austen’s last novel, left unfinished when she died. A comedy, it continues the strain of burlesque and caricature she wrote as a teenager and in private throughout her l...

The Second World War is over. England is losing its empire, world status and old elite values. The Empire strikes back with mass immigration, while the government soothes its people with welfare, the NHS, televisions and refrigerators. At the centre of the novel is the contemptuous Joan Kite, at odds with all the changes imposed on the country in the post war period. Shut up in a house with her only daughter, she refuses to compromise and adapt, pouring vitriol on anyone who seeks to enter...

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, lea...

Radiation Diaries tells of a month of radiotherapy treatment undergone when Janet Todd was president of a Cambridge college and while her father, in his 100th year, was approaching death, with skin cancer. The day-by-day treatment brought into her mind flashes from her early life in Bermuda and Ceylon with her father, in Ghana and Puerto Rico, as a young woman, along with stored poems from childhood. Written each morning and night, it tells of the terror she induced in herself with insomni...

Fanny Price, in Mansfield Park, tells her persistent suitor that 'we have all a better guide in ourselves...than any other person can be'. Sometimes, however, we crave external guidance: and when this happens we could do worse than seek it in Jane Austen's own subtle novels. Written to coincide with Austen's 250th birthday, this approachable and intimate work shows why and how - for over half a century - Austen has inspired and challenged its author through different phases of her life. Pa...

Both men and women took part in the education debate that culminated in the 1790s with Wollstonecraft, More and Edgeworth, but positions and arguments were laid down long before by Fordyce, Gregory, Gisbourne, West, Macaulay and Chapone, as featured in this text.

Both men and women took part in the education debate that culminated in the 1790s with Wollstonecraft, More and Edgeworth, but positions and arguments were laid down long before by Fordyce, Gregory, Gisbourne, West, Macaulay and Chapone, as featured in this text.

Both men and women took part in the education debate that culminated in the 1790s with Wollstonecraft, More and Edgeworth, but positions and arguments were laid down long before by Fordyce, Gregory, Gisbourne, West, Macaulay and Chapone, as featured in this text.

Both men and women took part in the education debate that culminated in the 1790s with Wollstonecraft, More and Edgeworth, but positions and arguments were laid down long before by Fordyce, Gregory, Gisbourne, West, Macaulay and Chapone, as featured in this text.

Both men and women took part in the education debate that culminated in the 1790s with Wollstonecraft, More and Edgeworth, but positions and arguments were laid down long before by Fordyce, Gregory, Gisbourne, West, Macaulay and Chapone, as featured in this text.

The combination of Mary Wollstonecraft works, with her efforts to live a revolutionary inner and outer life has no equal. In her richly detailed, all-encompassing biography of the first major feminist in England, Mary Wollstonecraft, Janet Todd highlights her intellectual and sexual dilemmas, her glamorous and tumultuous life and loves.Since the first publication of Mary Wollstonecraft: A revolutionary Life in2000, further historical evidence has been discovered – ...

A must-read for any devotee of Jane Austen, Janet Todd's 'naughty-Austen' reimagining of the epistolary novel Lady Susan will capture your literary imagination and get your heart racing.Austen's only anti-heroine, Lady Susan, is a beautiful, charming widow who has found herself, after the death of her husband, in a position of financial instability and saddled with an unmarried, clumsy and over-sensitive daughter. Faced with the unpalatable prospect of having to spend her w...