Jane Austen's Sanditon
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Coming to PBS Masterpiece Classic soon! Gorgeous, profound, delightful, useful, original, this fully illustrated, informative volume combines Jane Austen's Sanditon novel and Janet Todd's ground-breaking essay. </p> <p> «I so enjoyed Janet Todd's beautifully produced book.»Andrew Davies, screenwriter. </p> <p> Sanditon is Jane Austen’s last novel, left unfinished when she died. A comedy, it continues the strain of burlesque and caricature she wrote as a teenager and in private throughout her life. This beautifully illustrated volume combines the full novel and Todd’s ground-breaking essay, where she contextualizes Austen’s life and work, Sanditon’s connection with Northanger Abbey (1818) and the Austen family’s speculation in England and the West Indies. She examines the moral and social problems of capitalism, entrepreneurship, and whether wealth trickles down to benefit the place it is made. In explaining the early nineteenth-century culture of self: the exploitation of hypochondria, health fads, seaside resorts, cures, she contends that Sanditon is an innovative, ebullient study of human beings’ vagaries – rather than using common sense, Sanditon’s characters follow intuition and bodily signs believing that desire can be translated into physical facts and speech can transform fantasy into reality. Todd shows Austen’s themes to be akin to contemporary concerns: the mistakes of the self-deluded reveal the inevitable, ridiculous gap between how we think of ourselves and how we appear and sound to others.
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JANET TODD is a novelist, biographer and literary critic. A former President of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, she is an internationally renowned scholar and academic, known for her work on women’s writing and feminism. Her most recent publications include Radiation Diaries: Cancer, Memory and Fragments of a Life in Words; A Man of Genius; Lady Susan Plays the Game; and Aphra Behn: A Secret Life. She is the General Editor of The Cambridge Works of Jane Austen and editor of the Cambridge Companion to ‘Pride and Prejudice’.
‘Monumental, powerful, learned … sets the standard’ Frank Kermode, London Review of Books
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Diana Parker is not homeless, but she is consumed by finding lodgings for what turn out to be mythical visitors, and her manic house-hunting may draw something from Jane Austen’s experiences of trudging round Bath looking at ‘putrifying Houses’ in the hope of finding a place they could afford. All the novels are obsessed with houses, but none mentions so many kinds as Sanditon, which becomes a veritable estate agency of a book with its terraces, tourist cottages, hotels and puffed lodging-houses – all in imagination filled with rich tenants.
Underpinning anxiety about homelessness is of course money. Here the author’s life presses most fiercely on Sanditon. Jane Austen was not only disturbed by Edward’s threatening lawsuit but by something more definite. It happened just after she finished the last sentence of Sanditon, but it likely contributed to her inability to take up her pen again, so leaving her fragment ‘upon the Shelve’ along with Northanger Abbey.
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