Women's Friendship in Literature

by Janet Todd

In the introduction to her book, Women's Friendships in Literature, Janet Todd says that the main reason for writing the book is to prove Virginia Woolf wrong. In A Room of One's Own, Woolf claims that she has never encountered a description of real female friendship in the course of her reading. Todd totally disagrees with her. She feels that Eighteenth century literature in particular is "rich in presentations of female friendship"

434 pages, Hardcover

First published December 15, 1979

About the author

Janet Todd (Jan) is a novelist, biographer, literary critic and internationally renowned scholar, known for her work on
women’s writing and feminism. Her most recent books include
the novel: Don't You Know There's A War On?;
edition and essay: Jane Austen’s Sanditon;
memoir: Radiation Diaries: Cancer, Memory
and Fragments of a Life in Words;
biography: Aphra Behn: A Secret Life;
the novel: A Man of Genius 2016.
Jane Austen and Shelley in the Garden: An Illustrated Novel, forthcoming 2021

A co-founder of the journal Women’s Writing, she has published biographies and critical work on many authors,including Jane Austen, Mary Wollstonecraft, her daughters, Mary (Shelley) and Fanny (Death And The Maidens) , and the Irish-Republican sympathiser, traveller and medical student, Lady Mount Cashell (Daughters of Ireland).

Born in Wales, Janet Todd grew up in Britain, Bermuda and Ceylon/Sri Lanka and has worked at schools and universities in Ghana, Puerto Rico, India, the US (Douglass College,
Rutgers, Florida), Scotland (Glasgow, Aberdeen) and England (Cambridge, UEA). A former President of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, she is now an Honorary Fellow of
Newnham College.