Janet Todd talks to Suzi Feay

Novelist and academic Professor Janet Todd marks the 250th anniversary of the birth of Jane Austen by showing how Austen has inspired and challenged her personally through different phases of her life.

Todd reveals what ‘living with Jane Austen’ has meant to her and what it might also mean to others. She reflects on her own life and on Austen’s letters, manuscripts and novels. Todd says Austen has an undimmable power to help us understand the world and our minds and bodies. And she can teach us about patience, humour, beauty and the meaning of home.

Todd has an international reputation for her work on women writers including Austen, Aphra Behn and Mary Mary Wollstonecraft. She has also recently turned to writing novels including Lady Susan Plays the Game, A Man of Genius and Don’t You Know There’s a War On? She is an honorary fellow of Newnham and Lucy Cavendish Colleges at the University of Cambridge, where she established the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize. Here she talks to journalist and reviewer for the FT Suzi Feay.