Fentum Press – förlag

The life, work and history of Aphra Behn: seventeenth century dramatist, poet, novelist, political propagandist, bisexual writer, and spy. Praise for the first hardback edition: Fascinating scholarship. Todd conveys Behn's vivacious character and the mores of the time. the New York Times Ground-breakingit reads quickly and lightly. Even Todd s throwaway lines are steeped in learning and observation. Ruth Perry, MIT, Women s Review of Books A major biography; of interest to everyone who cares about women as writers. Times Higher Education Supplement Fascinating, a page-turner and a delight, an astonishingly thorough book. Emma Donoghue All women together ought to let flowers fall on the tomb of Aphra Behn...For it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds. Virginia Woolf Aphra Behn, a spy in the Netherlands and the Americas, was the first professional woman writer. The most prolific dramatist of her age, innovative novelist, translator, lyrical and erotic poet, she expresses a frank sexuality addressing impotence, orgasm and bisexuality, whilst serving as political propagandist for the monarch.This revised biography of the extraordinary, ground-breaking writer, who is emblematic of the Restoration period, a time of masks and self-fashioning, is set in conflict-ridden England, Europe, and in the mismanaged slave colonies, following the Puritan republic in 1660. Janet Todd, novelist and internationally renowned scholar, was President of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, and a Professor at Rutgers, NJ. An expert on women s writing and feminism, she has published on many writers, including Jane Austen, the Shelley Circle, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Aphra Behn. "

The Second World War is over. England is losing its empire, world status and old elite values. The Empire strikes back with mass immigration, while the government soothes its people with welfare, the NHS, televisions and refrigerators. At the centre of the novel is the contemptuous Joan Kite, at odds with all the changes imposed on the country in the post war period. Shut up in a house with her only daughter, she refuses to compromise and adapt, pouring vitriol on anyone who seeks to enter their lives. After years of frugality, patriotism, service and excitement, she is angry at the contracted existence she's been delivered and at the manner in which her aspirations to upper-middle-class culture have been thwarted. When her daughter is threatened, she begins a diary to investigate her past before and during the war. In it she gives rein to a flamboyant imaginary life and to an energetic loathing for the reality of a diminished England. During the freak hot summer of 1976, as water is rationed and ladybirds invade their home, the intimacy of mother and daughter intensifies. Their lives unravel within the claustrophobia of their semi-detached house behind closed velvet curtains.

Who attacked Dad? When corrupt, brutal dentist Albert Ludd is found battered and bloody after failing to attend a memorial party for his youngest son, a solider, suspicion falls on his other children, especially 37-year-old buxom bruiser Monica, who was heard “uttering threats” against her absent father. How come her car is found outside his house? Why did she buy a large axe? Yet, Monica’s a deputy head.Blood is a Gothic black comedy seen through the eyes of six-foot Monica, who speaks her secret thoughts aloud and who has been banned by the principal of her school, from using social media: “Parents are sensitive to abuse. Governors query `moron’ and `twat’.” Blood asks serious questions about modern life: what can we do with the brutal men who bully women and the weak? Can we wait for a world of order and justice? If we hit back, can the circle of violence ever be broken?

Exquisitely written diary of radiation treatment for pelvic cancers that delves into literary consciousness, feminism, memory and an unquiet past.

Sanditon is Jane Austen’s last novel, unfinished when she died in 1817.A comedy, it continues the strain of burlesque and caricature she wroteas a teenager and in private throughout her life. In her ground-breakingessay, Todd contextualizes Austen’s life and work, Sanditon’sconnection with Northanger Abbey (1819) and Emma (1816), JaneAusten’s insecurity of income and home, and the Austen family’sfinancial speculations. She examines the work’s discussion of the moraland social problems of capitalism, entrepreneurship, and growingtourism, and their effect on traditional values and rural communities.Todd explains the early nineteenth-century culture of self: theexploitation of hypochondria, health fads, seaside resorts, and miraclecures. Arguing that Sanditon is an innovative, ebullient study of humanbeings ’ vagaries (rather than using common sense, Sanditon’scharacters follow intuition and bodily signs), she shows Austen’sthemes to be akin to contemporary concerns about self-obsession andthe culture of narcissism, as well as a comic study of the gap betweenhow we think of ourselves and how we appear and sound to others.

Fast-paced, psychological suspense story of obsession. Has John killed his lover? Is she dead or is his mind playing tricks?