Jane Austen and Shelley in the Garden

Janet Todd

Description

Author Tour – East Coast – Jane Austen Society of North America JASNA NYC and JASNA Annual conference, Chicago, October 2021.
Promotion through chapters of JASNA across the US – 80 in the US, 8 in Canada. Co-op available. Print and online media campaign.
Advance reading copies available early for reviewers and stores. Outreach to author’s network of media, academic and literary connections
Bookstore co-op available
Media
Outreach for author to do essays/articles on Jane Austen. Key reviewers, long lead magazines, NPR, National media targets include literary fiction editors and reviewers in national dailies and magazines. National print campaign to include US trade press, Guardian US, commissioned piece on literary magazines, and to trade magazines including Library Journal, Booklist and academic journals, especially those on women’s writing, feminist journals.
Academic audiences include, marketing ASECS (American Association of Eighteenth-century Studies), Romanticism conference, MLA, women’s writing conferences.
E-Book Marketing: eBook available at the same time as print publication. Promoting e through usual channels- social media, print media and through deals with national, international and independent accounts, using promotions newsletters, price promos etc. liaising with print. Announcement e-mails sent to independent bookstores, academic journals and conference lists, and book clubs, literary bloggers. Twitter and campaign by publisher, author and PR agency, to include contests and giveaways. Bookseller and library promotions. Promotion on the author's social media accounts and on janettodd.co.uk.
Trade Shows—ALA, AWP, finished copies

Finished copies available for regional bookseller shows including:
•Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance (SIBA); Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association (PNBA); •New England Independent Booksellers Association (NEIBA); •Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association (MPIBA); •Heartland Fall Forum (MIBA & GLIBA); •Northern California Independent Booksellers Association
E¬Book Marketing: ebook available at the same time as print publication. Promoting e through social media, print media and through deals with national, international and independent accounts, using promotions newsletters, price promos etc.
Announcement e¬mails sent to independent bookstores, academic journals and conference lists, and book clubs, literary bloggers, cancer and health bloggers and websites.
Twitter and Facebook campaign by publisher, author and PR agency, to include contests and giveaways.
Author’s site: http://janettodd.co.uk/
Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janet_Todd;
University of Cambridge http://www.lucy-cav.cam.ac.uk/about-us/our-people/honorary-fellows/jan-todd/

Description for sales people

Jane Austen is a presence for thousands of readers; some even look to her for guidance in their lives. The novel investigates the relationships of three older women; one channels Jane Austen.

For readers of Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine and A Man Called Ove, this life-affirming, coming-of-old-age story, includes an interchange with Jane Austen throughout the book, and with a Shelley twist. It celebrates how lives are made extraordinary through friendship, books, and new experiences -- at any age.

A Jane Austen novel - confection of fiction, literary criticism and history, set in England, Wales, Venice, Italy, with illustrations in a homage to 19th century novels from leading Austen expert.

50 contemporary full-colour illustrations, reproduced in format suitable for gift/trade markets, with special paper and craft finishes, printed on hand-fed printing press

Promoted through Jane Austen Society of North America (JASNA), local and national chapters. Author appearance at JASNA, AGM, Chicago, October 2021.

Will appeal to fans of Jane Gardam, Julian Barnes, Karen Joy Fowler, Lily King, Gill Hornby, Penelope Lively, Barbara Pym, students of literature and creative writing; key for readers of Jane Austen’s novels.

Todd, a former academic, is a world expert on Jane Austen: gives speeches globally, is regularly interviewed on TV and radio on Austen. Jane Austen - Gresham Lecture (public) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wx4Ouc-Aqj4 Author clip, Q&A on Jane Austen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pvuREj8Elw BBC https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06pd3b9 BBC - Janet Todd on Jane Austen (In Our Time; host Melvyn Bragg)

When people are having to isolate, this novel is a balm, offering an expansive sense of friendship, renewal, and possibility at a time when the protagonists feel those chances may soon be gone.

2022 is the 200th anniversary of the death of Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Excerpt from the novel

“It is a truth universally…” begins Jane Austen.

“Shhh,” says Fran, finger on lips. “Not subtle. Money and sex. How many versions before you settled on that flirtatious, teasing opening?”

The amazing Agafia Lykova, reclusive and garrulous, lives alone in the wilderness of the Siberian Taiga. The last survivor of a family of Old Believers who fled Stalin’s persecutions in 1936, Agafia traps animals and grows potatoes. In a lean year, like Charlie Chaplin in The Gold Rush she eats her leather shoes. Excluding the shoes, the diet’s good—in her ‘70s she retains her teeth, though filed down from cracking nuts. Now a world-famous hermit, she receives numerous letters and presents. The donated modern food may cause tooth decay. Fran smiles with Jane Austen over this account. “I know,” she says, “the material is so intense we should focus on trifles. Those shoes, the fan letters.“ Nothing is trifling in the life of the isolate, the miraculous Lykova. Nor in the life of Jane Austen. Both are celebrities.

“I am a fridge magnet and banknote,” remarks Jane Austen. “Miss Lykova, I believe, is on YouTube.”

Fran looks through her kitchen window. Bare trees and flat, sodden, sewage-coloured February fields below a greyish sky. If the sky came lower-- moist, cold and alive-- would it squash the mushroom-smelling earth, leave a slug-trail? I may have to learn to be with people before it’s too late, she thinks. “You’d be happier if you had work, observes Jane Austen. Your Agafia’s busy fishing, digging, praying. You need intricate sewing. Men don’t sew. Men have guns,” says Jane Austen (contrary to admiring views, she’s not always in universal touch), “they get up with the lark to shoot things. Remember Robinson Crusoe, his fingers always moving…”

Annie suspects Jane Austen of haunting her friend. Not quite, Fran would say if they discussed the matter. The woman’s there, often uninvited. Like a dream she ambles in, sits down and won’t leave despite batting eyelids. Or an intruder, settled where a shadow should be. Is Fran grateful? Dickens’s Mrs Blimber from Dombey and Son said, if she could have known Cicero, she’d have died contented. Fran sometimes resents her Author muttering in her ear. Mind’s ear, Annie might have said had the discussion occurred.

“The fact is you’re too isolated here now you’ve retired. You’ll get weird if you stay much longer. Well, weirder.”

“I know,” says Fran, unable to repress a smile. She’s pleased when someone analyses her. “Dr Johnson thought solitude and idleness roads to madness. Can’t do idleness,” grins Fran fingering the small screwdriver in the drooping front pocket of her jumpsuit. She stares at the drizzle doing pointillism on the small-paned windows, then swivels her eyes towards thin cracks in the bulging plaster round the nobbled wood frames. Mice scamper along private alleyways. To prevent Annie noticing, she speaks loudly, “I’m planning to write now I’ve time. Something oblique, a little personal.” A recounted life’s the thing, she thinks, heading boldly into what must be a short and always maybe future.

“Writing in solitude may be as mad as talking to yourself. Virginia Woolf’s room of her own was in a big family house. You’ll never have a writing group out here. You haven’t even joined a book club.” Fran avoids looking at Jane Austen, who, she guesses, smirks by the window. She hears the Author saying (for the umpteenth time) that she never wrote alone, someone was always at home to applaud a paragraph, laugh at a witticism. Women do not need rooms of their own--we do not all live in Bloomsbury, she rumbles on. We were a big bustling family, extra young people about, father’s pupils, friends, relations. Just Mum, Dad and Me, sighs Fran. But we were content.

What, thinks Annie, can Fran write about? She has no fierceness about lost life. Those dear shapeless parents in their warm little bungalow? Then she recalls drowned Andrew.

“One can live alone without finding oneself lonely.”

“Naturally.” Annie winces at the pronoun. She’d been mocked as bourgeois and (paradoxically) an echo of that fossil Prince Charles for using it in a lecture. Now she forces herself into ungrammatical obscenity, while feeling the impatience of a convert.

“I don’t miss teaching,” says Fran. “It was just entertainment. But I wanted some swagger in my life.” Fran hesitates, “I guess I feel a bit of a failure.” She wishes she’d not had to work hard for everything. So much nicer to have it through luck.

Annie glances benignly at her friend. “Not a failure, you just chose a profession you were ill-equipped for.”

“You mean you’re competent and I’m not?”

“No, but I persevered at….’ Fran isn’t listening. She doesn’t want to hear Annie say again how little her efforts have been rewarded. Fran relishes her friend’s successes.

“You’ll be retired soon. A Senior Railcard takes you anywhere.” Old age is an equalizer, Fran means. It can, should they choose, be daisy-time together.

The Author sits in a nook alone. “I never fail,” she remarks. Fran stares towards the darkness. She knows what Jane Austen thinks of her quiet mastery, her magical tactile density. She also knows what she thinks of her author’s faux humility, those little pieces if ivory she claimed to be writing on with little effect. Really!

“There are readers who say my books repeat themselves,” continues Jane Austen; “pretty girl catches eligible man. Common romances. Not so. Only a jealous person understands real love, always one-sided. Fanny Price, my heroine with the undiverted heart.”

“You wrote she’d have taken another man, you betrayed her.”

“I am a realist. I deal in probabilities.”

“Pride and Prejudice: the girl who gets it all?”

“Things exactly as they are,” murmurs Jane Austen dreamily, “a crimson horse and blue guitar.” She pulls herself back to her time. One must earn pewter.

“You created weak Fanny Price to atone for Lizzie Bennet’s ludicrous luck and rudeness. Is it a virtue to be healthy?”

Copyright Janet Todd, 2021

Sujets

• Feminist
• Biographical
• Women
• Lord Byron
• Friendship
• Biography
• Woman
• Feminism
• Sanditon
• The Women
• Shelley
• Byron
• Wales
• Venice
• Fiction
• Cambridge

Informations

• Publié par: Global Book Sales
• Date de parution: 21 juillet 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781909572287
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Jane Austen and Shelley in the Garden
JANET TODD 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 Don t You Know There s a War On? ; Jane Austen s Sanditon ; Radiation Diaries ; Aphra Behn: A Secret Life ; and A Man of Genius . She has published biographies and critical work on many authors, including Jane Austen, Aphra Behn, Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughters, Mary (Shelley) and Fanny, and her Irish pupil, Lady Mount Cashell.
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 and Florida), Scotland (Glasgow, Aberdeen) and England (Cambridge, UEA). A former President of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, and Emerita Professor at the University of Aberdeen, she is now an Honorary Fellow of Newnham College.
Praise for Janet Todd s previous works
Don t You Know There s a War On?
Lush prose this smouldering novel is a dark and strangely disquieting pleasure. Times Literary Supplement
I love this powerful, brilliant evocation of post WWII life. Strongly recommended. Miriam Margolyes
Radiation Diaries: Cancer, Memory and Fragments of a Life in Words
Janet Todd s pain-filled interweaving of life and literature is a good book written against the odds - it is frank, wry and unexpectedly heartening. Hilary Mantel
A stunningly good, tight, intelligent, truthful book and one of the most touching love letters to literature I have ever read. Ah, so that s why we write, I thought. Maggie Gee
I read it avidly, unable to stop. I love the voice, especially the tension between restraint and candour in its brevities - and yet endearingly warm and honest. It s an original voice and utterly convincing in its blend of confession, quirkiness, humour, intimacy. It s nothing short of a literary masterpiece, inventing a genre. A delight too is the embeddedness of books in the character of a lifelong reader; it is fascinating to learn of Todd s fascinating variegated past. How gallant (like the verbal gallop against mortality at the close of The Waves ). Lyndall Gordon
A Man of Genius
Strange and haunting, a gothic novel with a modern consciousness. Philippa Gregory
A quirky, darkly mischievous novel about love, obsession and the burden of charisma, played out against the backdrop of Venice s watery, decadent glory. Sarah Dunant
A mesmerizing story of love and obsession: dark and utterly compelling. Natasha Solomons
Intriguing and entertaining; clever, beguiling. Salley Vickers
A real knack for language with some jaw-droppingly luscious dialogue. I can see the author s pedigree in the story, style, and substance of the book. It seems like a wonderful sleeper: think Elegance of the Hedgehog . Geoffrey Jennings, Rainy Day Books
A haunting, sophisticated story about a woman slowly discovering the truth about herself and the elusive, possibly illusive, nature of genius. Sunday Times
Mesmerizing, haunting pages from a gothic-driven imagination. Times Literary Supplement
Gripping, original, with abundant thrills, spills and revelations.
The Lady
Aphra Behn: A Secret Life
Genuinely original. Antonia Fraser, The Times
Janet Todd has a good ear for tone and a deep understanding. Emma Donoghue
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. Independent on Sunday
Thorough and stimulating. Maureen Duffy, Literary Review
Todd has an enjoyably satirical style; she writes with shrewdness, humour and compassion. Miranda Seymour, Sunday Times
A rip-roaring read. Michele Roberts, Sunday Times
A convincing and entertaining path through Behn s life in the vivid context of her times an effective mixture of historical research, literary criticism and fiction that brings us as close as we may ever get to the truth of this enterprising and enigmatic literary figure. Shelf Awareness
A brisk, entertaining, and richly detailed portrait of a unique woman and her era. Kirkus
Janet Todd guides us with unfailing buoyancy and a wit all her own through the intricacies of Restoration theatre and politics. [Behn s] epitaph seems to suggest her wit is buried with her. Not at all; it is now wondrously resurrected. Evening Standard
Jane Austen
Monumental, powerful, learned sets the standard. Frank Kermode, London Review of Books
Essential for anyone with a serious interest in Austen rendered with razor-sharp clarity for a modern audience - exceptionally useful. Duncan Wu, Raymond Wagner Professor in Literary Studies, Georgetown University
Intelligent and accessible. Times Literary Supplement Easy to read and engaging; excellent on Austen s work. Choice
Janet Todd is one of the foremost feminist literary historians writing now. Lisa Jardine, Centenary Professor of Renaissance Studies, Director of the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters, University of London, Independent on Sunday
Death and the Maidens: Fanny Wollstonecraft and the Shelley Circle; Mary Wollstonecraft
Todd is an extraordinary researcher and sophisticated critic. This biography conjures a vivid sense of a revolutionary and a woman, and offers precise insights into the progress of one writer s life. Ruminator
A juicy portrait, reconstructed with insight and wit. Entertainment Weekly
Terrific insight Todd soundly and generously reimagines women s lives. Publishers Weekly (Starred)
Janet Todd brilliantly captures the absurdity in Wollstonecraft while defending the view that her life was both important and revolutionary. Like Virginia Woolf, Todd interprets this life as a daring experiment. Wollstonecraft is all but resurrected in Janet Todd s distinguished book: brave, reckless and wide open to life. Virginia Woolf claimed for Wollstonecraft a special kind of immortality. Janet Todd has strengthened the case. Ruth Scurr, The Times
The great strength of Janet Todd s biography lies in her willingness to unpick the feminist frame on which earlier lives of Wollstonecraft were stretched to fit. Kathryn Hughes, Literary Review
Janet Todd, a feminist, has done ground-breaking scholarship on women writers. Her work reads quickly and lightly Even Todd s 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, MIT, Women s Review of Books
Jane Austen and Shelley in the Garden
A Novel with Pictures
Janet Todd

Fentum Press
Fentum Press, London
Sold and distributed by Global Book Sales/Macmillan Distribution and in North America by Consortium Book Sales and Distribution, Inc. part of the Ingram Content Group.
Copyright 2021 Janet Todd
Janet Todd asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN (paperback) 978-1-909572-270
Ebook: 978-1-909572-28-7
Typeset in Fournier by Patty Rennie
Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
For Miriam
Contents
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Part Two
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Part Three
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Part Four
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Part Five
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Part One
1
It is a truth universally, begins Jane Austen
Shhh, says Fran, finger on lips. Not subtle. Money and sex. How many versions before you settled on that flirtatious opening?
The amazing Agafia Lykova, reclusive and garrulous, lives most of her life alone in the wilderness of the Siberian Taiga. The last survivor of a family of Old Believers who fled Stalin s persecutions in 1936, Agafia traps animals and fish and grows potatoes. In a lean year, like Charlie Chaplin in The Gold Rush , she eats her leather shoes. Excluding the shoes, the diet s good - in her seventies she retains her teeth, though filed down from cracking nuts. Now a world-famous hermit, she receives numerous letters and presents. The donated modern food may cause tooth decay.
Fran smiles with Jane Austen over this account. I know, she says, the material is so intense we should focus on trifles. Those shoes, the fan letters.
Nothing is trifling in the life of the isolate, the miraculous Agafia Lykova.
Nor in the life of Jane Austen. Both are celebrities.
I am a fridge magnet, remarks Jane Austen. Miss Lykova, I believe, is on YouTube.
Fran looks through her kitchen window. Bare trees and flat, sodden, sewage-coloured February fields below a greyish sky. If the sky came lower - moist, cold and alive - would it squash the mushroom-smelling earth, leave a slug-trail? I may have to learn to live with people before it s too late, she thinks.

You d be happier if you had work, observes Jane Austen. Your Agafia s busy fishing, digging and praying. You should take up intricate sewing.
Men don t sew.
Men have guns, says Jane Austen (contrary to admiring views, she s not always in universal touch), they get up with the lark to shoot things.
She slides behind the great fireplace as Annie Klein ducks her head to negotiate the lintel at the foot of the staircase.
Annie suspects Jane Austen of haunting her fr