Todd - Aphra Behn: A Secret Life

Todd has a good ear for tone and a deep understanding. An astonishingly thorough book Emma Donoghue

A rip-roaring read Michle Roberts, The Sunday Times

Genuinely original Antonia Fraser, The Times

Janet Todd is one of the foremost feminist literary historians writing in this country. She has devoted her literary career to recovering the lives and works of women writers overlooked and disparaged by generations of male literary scholars Lisa Jardine, Independent on Sunday

Janet Todd guides us with unfailing buoyancy and a wit all her own through the intricacies of Restoration theatre and politics. [Behns] epitaph seems to suggest her wit is buried with her. Not at all; it is now wondrously resurrected Michael Foot, Evening Standard

Thorough and stimulating.clear readable prose....a fascinating study of the public face of Behn, of its shifting masks and modes

Maureen Duffy, Literary Review

A major new biographyTodds rich biography will be of interest to everyone who cares about the period or about women as writers

Jane Spencer, The Times Higher Education Supplement

Janet Todd, a feminist scholar, has done a great deal of ground-breaking scholarship on women writers of the long eighteenth century. The book is certainly accessible for the lay historianit reads quickly and lightly...Even Todds throwaway lines are steeped in learning and observation. Todd has documented so ably the daring attempt of a woman to write, both for her daily bread and for immortal fame

Ruth Perry, Womens Review of Books

Todd is so scrupulous and educated an observer that one never has any sense of being fobbed off with speculative fiction rather than well adduced fact.... Todd has shown that even determined secrecy and a series of carefully shaped masks offer no protection against posterity. This is as much of Aphra Behn as we are ever likely to know

Brian Morton, Scotland on Sunday

Janet Todds brilliant biography of Aphra Behn weaves a story together with precision, verve and confidence. Witty and pugnacious, Todds book is as much a window on the public cacophony of the era as it is a portrait of a playwright Melanie McGrath, Independent

JANET TODD

For copyright reasons, any images not belonging to the original author have been removed from this book. The text has not been changed, and may still contain references to missing images

An earlier edition of this book, The Secret Life of Aphra Behn, was published in 1996 by Andr Deutsch Ltd/Rutgers University Press, and in 2000 by Rivers Oram/Pandora.

This electronic edition published in 2017 by Bloomsbury Reader

This edition copyright 2017 Janet Todd

Cover image: Woman with a Mask (oil on canvas)
Lorenzo Lippi (160665) / Muse des Beaux-Arts, Angers, France
Bridgeman Images
Cover design: Jeremy Hopes

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eISBN: 9781448216956

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For Maureen Duffy

Janet Todd was born in Wales and grew up in Britain, Bermuda and Sri Lanka. She has worked in Ghana, Puerto Rico, India, Scotland and England. In the US, at the University of Florida and Douglass College, Rutgers, she began the first journal devoted to womens writing. She has published on the novel and memoir and written biographies of Jane Austen, Mary Wollstonecraft, her daughters Fanny and Mary Shelley, and the Irish Lady Mount Cashell. A Professor Emerita at the University of Aberdeen and Honorary Fellow of Newnham College, Janet Todd is a former President of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, where she established the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize. She has published two novels: Lady Susan Plays the Game and A Man of Genius. She lives in Cambridge and Venice.

JANET TODDS PREVIOUS WORKS

Womens Friendship in Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980, 1984, 1992)

English Congregational Hymns in the Eighteenth Century; their purpose and design (Watts to Cowper), co-authored with M. Marshall (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1983)

Sensibility: an Introduction (London: Methuen, 1986)

Feminist Literary History (Cambridge: Polity Press and New York: Routledge, 1988) The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing and Fiction 1660 1800 (London: Virago, 1989; New York: Columbia University Press, 1990, 1992)

Gender, Art and Death (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993)

The Secret Life of Aphra Behn (London: Andr Deutsch, 1996; New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997; London and New York: Pandora and New York University Press, 1999; London: Bloomsbury eBook, 2013)

The Critical Fortunes of Aphra Behn (London and New York: Boydell and Brewer, 1998)

The Revolutionary Life of Mary Wollstonecraft (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson; New York: Columbia University Press, 2000; paperback London: Phoenix Press, 2001; London: Bloomsbury eBook, 2013)

Rebel Daughters: Ireland in Conflict (London: Viking, 2003; Daughters of Ireland New York: Ballantine Books, 2004)

The Cambridge Introduction to Jane Austen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)

Death and the Maidens: Fanny Wollstonecraft and the Shelley Circle (London: Profile Books; Berkeley: Counterpoint Press, 2007)

The Jane Austen Treasury: A Collection of Fascinating Insights into Her Life, Her Time and Her Novels (London: Andr Deutsch, 2014, 2017)

Lady Susan Plays the Game (London: Bloomsbury eBook, 2013; paperback, 2016) A Man of Genius (London: Bitter Lemon Press, 2016; paperback, 2017)

Selected Editions since 1990

The Complete Works of Alary Wollstonecraft (7 vols., with Marilyn Butler) (London: Pickering and Chatto and New York: New York University Press, 1990) Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary, A Fiction and Maria; Mary Shelley, Matilda (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1991; London: Penguin, 1992)

Oroonoko, The Rover and Other Works (London: Penguin, 1992)

The Complete Works of Aphra Behn (7 vols., London: Pickering and Chatto; Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1992 6; London: Taylor and Francis ebook, 2017)

The Poetry of Aphra Behn (New York: New York University Press, 1996)

Aphra Behn, Love-Letters between a Nobleman and his Sister (London: Penguin, 1996) The Political Writings of Mary Wollstonecraft