SPECIAL GUESTS ON BBC RADIO 4'S OPEN BOOK

Yours truly and Professor Janet Todd (Cambridge)

Now that we are spending more time at home (due to coronavirus), the old BBC Radio 4 programmes are enjoying an increased listenership and right now, readers (and writers) are listening to Open Book presented by Mariella Frostrup and her guest Professor Janet Todd. 

Our SWWJ members were thrilled to meet Janet Todd some years back when some of our members spent the weekend at Cambridge University. We received a wonderful welcome from Janet, an internationally renowned novelist and academic, best known for her non-fiction feminist works on women writers.  publishing Lady Susan Plays the Game, a Jane Austen spin-off, in 2013 and A Man of Genius in 2016. Her novel Don’t You Know There’s a War On! has just been published. 

Janet has published and edited more than 38  books including the complete works of Mary Wollstonecraft (with Marilyn Butler), of Aphra Behn, and, as General Editor, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen. She has compiled encyclopedias of women writers and written individual biographies:  Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life; Rebel Daughters/ Daughters of Ireland; Death and the Maidens: Fanny Wollstonecraft and the Shelley Circle ; Jane Austen: Her Life, Her Times, Her Novels; and Aphra Behn A Secret Life  (2017).

Her latest work is  Jane Austen’s Sanditon (2019),  newly edited and with a long introductory essay and 24 illustrations from the period.

Janet has worked in universities around the world including Ghana, Puerto Rico, North America and India. She was a professor of English Literature at UEA, Glasgow and Aberdeen Universities, before becoming president of Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge (2008-2015), Cambridge where she established the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize. She is now an Honorary Fellow of Newnham and Lucy Cavendish Colleges. In 2013, Janet was given an OBE for her services to higher education and literary scholarship.