Janet Todd

Novelist, critic and Jane Austen scholar Professor Janet Todd talks about her new novel, a meditation on age, literature, friendship, hope and the joy of new opportunities.

Fran’s interest in Jane Austen is such that she has imaginary conversations with her in her cottage and garden. Austen guides and chides her. Fran meets a long-standing friend and a new one, a writer. The three women unite in their love of books and in a quest for the idealist poet Shelley. Shelley’s yearning for utopia leads them all to interrogate their past relationships, motherhood, literature, death, feminism, and the tensions between generations.

Todd is emerita professor at the University of Aberdeen and a fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge. She is author of The Cambridge Introduction to Jane Austen and of Jane Austen’s Sanditon, Radiation Diaries, Aphra Behn: A Secret Life, A Man of Genius, and Don’t You Know There’s a War On?