Janet Todd

speaker

181 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 6 Aug

Janet Todd’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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In Our Time · Archive: Aphra Behn · 6 Aug 2026 podcast

I mean, she is extraordinary in that respect.

And she very much admires the classical philosopher Lucretius, whom she reads in translation.

And Lucretius thought that the world was all made up of shifting atoms.

And so that when a person dies, then he or she just becomes a series of atoms floating off into the air.

So there is no afterlife.

And Ben clearly did not believe in an afterlife.

I was just going to say, exactly, we don't know.

But towards the end of her life, she was such a propagandist for James II, and very few people were as loyal as she was at the end.

So I have a feeling that she was paid at that point.

She's always short of money, so you can never really tell from the fact that she's short of money that she isn't being paid.

But that slew of propagandist poems at the end, all printed by the king's printer, I would have thought that she was at that point being paid by the government of James II.

Well, I think she can protest anything when she needs to.

And I think she sort of flirts with Catholicism.

She certainly likes the bells and smells of Catholicism.

She's very keen on the whole panoply of it.

So I don't think she would be opposed.

And I think she, unlike the majority of the nation, she saw James II as somebody who was tolerant.

And so when he was imposing Catholicism, she saw in a way that he was allowing tolerance.

But her total devotion or apparent devotion, she's always equivocal.

Her apparent devotion to James II is something of a puzzle to most of us.

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