A Man of Genius

By Janet Todd

"Strange and haunting, a gothic novel with a modern consciousness." Philippa Gregory

"A haunting, sophisticated story about a woman discovering the truth about herself and the elusive, possibly illusive, nature of genius." Sunday Times

"Mesmerizing, haunting, imbued with a complete sense of historical verisimilitude" Times Literary Supplement

"A psychologically haunting and disturbing tale as full of mystery, exotic foreign places, and questions of parentage as any penned by her protagonist." Library Journal

"Thrilling and heartbreaking, a gothic novel with emotional heart and depth." Foreword Reviews

"A 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 in nineteenth-century Venice: dark and utterly compelling." Natasha Solomons

Set in bustling Regency England and decaying Venice, A Man of Genius portrays a psychological journey from safety into secrecy and obsession. After a troubled childhood, Ann achieves independence earning her living as an author of Gothic novels. Within a group of male writers, she meets and is enthralled by the supposed poetic genius, Robert James. They become uneasy lovers. Ann and Robert travel from London through a Europe exhausted by the Napoleonic Wars. They arrive in a Venice of spies and intrigue, where their relationship becomes tortuous and Robert descends into near madness. Forced to flee with a stranger, Ann delves into her past to be jolted by a series of revelations about her lover, her parentage, the stranger, and herself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bitter Lemon Press
• Release date: Mar 24, 2016
• ISBN: 9781912242757

Janet Todd

Janet Todd is an internationally renowned scholar of early women writers. She has edited the complete works of England's first professional woman writer, Aphra Behn, and the Enlightenment feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, as well as novels by Charlotte Smith, Mary Shelley and Eliza Fenwick and memoirs of the confidence trickster Mary Carleton. Janet Todd is the general editor of the 9-volume Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen and editor of Jane Austen in Context and the Cambridge Companion to Pride and Prejudice. Among her critical works are Women's Friendship in Literature, The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing and Fiction 1660-1800 and the Cambridge Introduction to Jane Austen. She has written four biographies: of Aphra Behn and three linked women, Mary Wollstonecraft, her daughter, and her aristocratic Irish pupils. In the 1970s Janet Todd taught in the USA, during which time she began the first journal devoted to women's writing. Back in the UK in the 1990s she co-founded the journal Women's Writing. Janet has had a peripatetic and busy life, working at universities in Ghana, the US, and Puerto Rico, as well as England and Scotland. She is now an emeritus professor at the University of Aberdeen and lives in Cambridge.