Arguably Janet Todd is the leading expert on Mary Wollstonecraft, with a quality of scholarship that is unsurpassed. In 2013 she was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire in honor of her contribution to scholarship and higher education.

Before she wrote Revolutionary Life, she produced Mary Wollstonecraft: An Annotated Bibliography covering critical and biographical entries from 1788 through 1975. A steady stream of criticism on Wollstonecraft has been published since the bibliography's first publication in 1976, and although Routledge has recently reprinted it, the work is outdated if one is looking for more contemporary criticism and biographies. However, the bibliography is still valuable for Todd's notes on books and articles published prior to 1975. Additionally, through Pickering & Chatto, Todd has produced scholarly editions of all of Wollstonecraft's works, including her articles in Analytical Review.

Todd's Daughters of Ireland (2003) contains very little biographical information on Wollstonecraft, but it certainly educates the reader as to the significance of that one year (1786–87), when Wollstonecraft was the governess to the Kingsboroughs, in forming Wollstonecraft's perceptions of the upper class that so profusely informs Rights of Woman. Caroline Fitzgerald, who would become Lady Kingsborough, descended from Old Celtic and Anglo blood, with an ancestor, the White Knight, whose battle wounds were bandaged with a white scarf by Edward III (4). She was the heiress of 75,000 acres, or 21 miles, of Cork and Limerick land and of Mitchelstown Castle. She married her cousin Robert and theirs was the largest fortune in Ireland (4).

Todd's book gives the reader a better understanding as to why Lady Caroline often invited Wollstonecraft and sometimes pressed her into joining her social gatherings and functions, even though Wollstonecraft was a “mere governess.” When Wollstonecraft's Thoughts on the Education of Daughters was published, she was Lady Caroline's trophy. In the Wollstonecraft biographies, Lady Kingsborough's behavior seemed erratic and eccentric, but Todd's book explains how she came to be what she was, the kind of woman who showed more affection and attention on her dogs than to her children (89), the kind of woman who would spend more than five hours a day getting dressed (90), the kind of woman who fashionably lisped (90) and the kind of woman who spent £500 on a gown for Margaret that was the equivalent of 12 years of salary for a governess (117).