Janet Todd was born in Wales and had a wandering childhood in England, Scotland, Bermuda and Ceylon. She worked as an academic in Ghana, Puerto Rico, the US (University of Florida and Professor at Rutgers, NJ), Scotland and England. An Emerita Professor at the University of Aberdeen, until recently she was President of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge. An internationally renowned scholar, she is an expert on Jane Austen, Mary Wollstonecraft and Aphra Behn. Her passion has been for women writers, both the largely unknown and the famous.