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Introductory Essay

The two faces of Jane Austen: the watercolour sketch by her sister Cassandra; and its prettified version to accompany her nephew’s hagiographical Memoir in 1870

The phenomenon of Jane Austen

Jane Austen is one of the greatest novelists in English Literature, a pioneer in fiction and an immense influence on those who wrote after her. Whether intended for publication or private amusement, whether from finished or abandoned works or from fragments, all her words have interest for us now in our eclectic and curious twenty-first century.

Her fame rests primarily on the six published novels. With a first glance, these appear simple, romantic, almost wish-fulfilling tales. Yet, each is profoundly complex, and each is distinct in tone and technique. Few people fail to be delighted by a first reading of Pride and Prejudice or Persuasion; further readings of all the novels reveal the delights of unexpected intricacy, meaning, subversion – and sometimes uncomfortable conformity to values now largely ignored. The greatness of Jane Austen is that her books are never exhausted; they retain an ability to nudge and surprise.

Reading is a conversation between novelist and reader, and each generation reads Jane Austen differently, finding her speaking to cultural concerns hardly glimpsed by readers in previous centuries. And we ourselves may read her several times over the years: when we do, we find her addressing our new interests, while she lets us bring something from our own stage of life to an interpretation of her protean works.

Austen is that rarity in the traditional canon of English fiction: a figure pored over by scholars while being loved and read by the general public. Only Dickens and the Brontës come close to this achievement, but not even those valued writers have acquired her megafandom, leading to an internet full of invented characters snatched from the novels to become psychotherapists, detectives, etiquette gurus and teenaged pals. Jane Austen’s books have been subjected to analysis in all facets, while films and television adaptations have made the author and her fiction a global brand.

Happily, she has survived fame and celebrity unspoilt.

The popularity is explicable. Love and romance are winning subjects and Jane Austen delivers them, but with a hard-headedness about money and compromise that surprises a reader who comes from the films to the novels rather than vice versa. The characters she creates seem real: they live in families with whom they must relate, however repugnant some of the members, as well as in the wider society of men and women. Her heroines learn how to stay true to their own intelligence and some inner core of being, while coping with uncongenial people and responding to constricting social pressures. They are believable.

Yet Jane Austen and the characters she creates move in a world very different from ours. The early nineteenth century is often called Regency, although the actual Regency, when George III was declared insane and unable to govern, lasts only from 1811 to 1820. It occurs just before the railways made England smaller and its people more mobile, and before photography became widespread, causing us to look back on the Victorian world as predominantly black and white. Jane Austen has become synonymous with a colourful Regency of romance and grace. In popular culture she also stands for heritage, an immemorial rural England of church, great house and grateful villagers, a place of stability.

In fact, the Regency was a time of extraordinary upheaval and change. It included two revolutions, the effects of which are still being worked out in the modern world. The French Revolution started in 1789 when Jane was still a child, then morphed into the first truly global conflict, the Napoleonic Wars, lasting, with one brief interval of peace, until 1815 and darkening almost all Jane Austen’s adult life. The Industrial Revolution, which would transform Britain into the first urban industrial power, accelerated in her lifetime, ultimately reshaping the world.

Readers have remarked that Jane Austen’s subject (‘3 or 4 Families in a Country Village’) seems largely to ignore these turbulent historical events, as well as the movement of enclosure which turned England into a land of private property and hedged fields. (Austen’s own family members benefited from this transformation.) But look closely and you will catch between lines and in apparently desultory dialogue glimpses of all these changes. You will also encounter political and social opinions sometimes gratifyingly liberal, at others sternly alien to our present way of thinking: rare certainties and many ambiguities.

Her life

Jane Austen was born on 16 December 1775 in Steventon, a small village in Hampshire. Her extended family was mixed, including a few rich landowners, many clerics, and an apprentice milliner. Hers was a reasonably pleasant middle-class background, close to the gentry but never absolutely secure in status or income.

Her father George Austen, a country rector, obtained his living through patronage of a wealthy relative, and augmented it with farming and tutoring pupils for university. He had need of all the income he could get, for he and his wife Cassandra had eight children to raise. Two were girls, Jane and her elder sister Cassandra.

Apart from a disabled one, the boys did reasonably well in life through patronage and effort. The eldest James followed his father into the Steventon living. Edward, the most fortunate, was adopted by rich relatives called Knight, and in due course inherited their vast estates which included Godmersham Park in Kent and Chawton House in Hampshire. At the tender ages of eleven and twelve, Frank and Charles entered the Royal Naval Academy and rose up the ranks during the long French wars. Henry became soldier, banker and clergyman by turns.

In contrast, the Austen girls had marriage or attendance on relatives to look forward to in later life. Both received marriage proposals. Cassandra was engaged to a curate who became a military chaplain and died abroad, while Jane accepted, then speedily rejected, an offer from a neighbour, Harris Bigg-Wither, a young man of good family and estate but insufficient attractions. Perhaps, too, she already knew what she wanted most of all to do with her life. It was not long after this rejection that she sold her first novel – Susan – though sadly it was not printed at the time. (It was revised and came out posthumously as Northanger Abbey.)

Jane began writing early, amusing her family with comic, knowing little stories and plays, then turning her hand to complete novels. First versions of Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice were all composed at the rectory in Steventon. Then, abruptly in 1801, youth ended. Her father decided to leave his son James as curate of Steventon and move to Bath where he and his wife could take the waters for their health. Unconsulted, the spinster daughters of course accompanied them.

Soon after the move, in 1805, George Austen died, and his income with him. For the next years the Austen women led a makeshift life, moving from place to place to be near male relatives or find suitably cheap lodgings. Finally, in 1809, they were rescued by the wealthy Edward, who set up his mother and sisters in a former bailiff’s cottage on his estate in Chawton. From this house, Jane published her first novels, Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice. Then followed two new ones, Mansfield Park and Emma, both evoking a more intense sense of home than the books drafted in Steventon. After she died, two further novels, the early drafted Northanger Abbey and the late Persuasion were brought out by her family.

The cottage in Chawton, Hampshire

On her death at the age of only forty-one, Jane Austen left two works unfinished. The Watsons was begun in the Bath years. It tells the story of a family of girls rather like the Bennets, but the work lacks the lightness and jollity that make Pride and Prejudice so appealing. The Watson daughters need to marry but from more desperate financial circumstances. As the heroine remarks to a stupid, rich young aristocrat, ‘Female economy will do a great deal my Lord, but it cannot turn a small income into a large one.’

Jane Austen made many corrections and revisions to the manuscript, then stopped writing. Possibly the difficult situation of the women she described came too close to her own rather insecure life; possibly her existence in all its facets was simply interrupted by her father’s death. The novel was to have depicted the death of a clergyman, who dies leaving his daughters unprovided for.

The other, more fluent, innovative fragment is Sanditon. The writing of this was not abandoned but interrupted by her own last illness, which ended in her death in July 1817.

Sanditon and its plot

Was there ever a fragment like it? The distinguished novelist suffering a long decline – her brother Henry alleged that ‘the symptoms of a decay, deep and incurable, began to show themselves in the commencement of 1816’ – used her last months to compose a work that mocks energetic hypochondriacs and departs radically from the increasing emphasis on the interior life marking the previous novels. However weak her body – and she wrote some passages first in pencil, being unable to cope with a pen – clearly her spirit was robust. Not only that: worrying herself sick about money after a family bankruptcy, she was writing a book of jokes about risky investments and comic speculators.

For us, her readers and admirers, the farcical, ebullient Sanditon is achingly sad, for it ends with ‘March 18’, neatly written on an almost empty page. The final date signified that Jane Austen would write no more novels. A few days later she admitted, ‘Sickness is a dangerous Indulgence at my time of Life.’ She had begun the work in a period of remission, but now she sighed, ‘I must not depend upon being ever very blooming again.’ In April, she admitted, ‘I have really been too unwell the last fortnight to write anything’: she was suffering from ‘a Bilious attack, attended with a good deal of fever’. Four months after interrupting her last novel, she died.

Frugal with paper and densely covering her page with neat handwriting, at her death she left empty a large portion of the homemade Sanditon booklets (created by folding and cutting sheets of writing paper, then stitching them together). We know that she was dying, she could not be sure. As a result of these blank prepared pages, the final dating, and the enigmatic nature of the plot, what is not written haunts what is, and no number of continuations by cameras and other pens can quite displace the ghostly presence of that emptiness.

In contrast to the earlier novels about great houses and rural villages, Sanditon’s twelve chapters do not describe a tight country society but a developing coastal resort full of restless travelling people – the novel becomes an exuberant comedy not of organic community but rather of bodies whose weaknesses are delivered with zest. It is a surprising subject for Jane Austen’s last work, which fits neither with her previous subtle comedies of manners nor with the sentimental romantic nostalgia they gave rise to in her global fandom. The world of Sanditon is absurd, unsettled and unsettling.

The final, mainly empty page of Sanditon.

The fragment introduces an array of smart, silly and ludicrous characters. Like Northanger Abbey and Mansfield Park, it begins by translating the heroine, Charlotte Heywood, to a place where she can enter a story. She is the first Austen heroine with the name (although Elizabeth Bennet’s friend Charlotte Lucas plays a significant role in Pride and Prejudice). In a letter of 1813 Austen related how she met a ‘Charlotte Williams’, whose sagacity and taste she admired. ‘Those large, dark eyes always judge well. – I will compliment her, by naming a Heroine after her.’

Charlotte Heywood’s translation comes about through an accident. On his way from London to the coast and making a detour to find a surgeon for his new resort, the impetuous Mr Tom Parker unwisely insists on trundling his hired coach up a poorly maintained lane. It overturns, and the crash gives him a sprained ankle. He is forced to stay with nearby rural landowners, the practical Heywoods, just then busy with June hay-making; on his departure, he repays their fortnight’s hospitality by carrying with him one of their fourteen children.

‘The Runaway Coach’, Thomas Rowlandson, c. 1791

Unlike the heroines of Northanger Abbey and Mansfield Park, Charlotte is not deposited in a great house to cope with bullying or tyrannical inmates. Instead, she is taken to the new resort of Sanditon on the Sussex coast, where, much like her fictional predecessors, she will, over the next weeks, observe, judge, maybe change and possibly find love – though by the end of the fragment few hints of a lover are emerging beyond a promising mention of sense and wealth in Tom Parker’s younger brother Sidney. (Perhaps strangely so for readers eager to find romance in the author herself. A family tradition has Jane falling in love in the Devon coastal resort of Sidmouth, probably with a clergyman – the younger family members often seem eager to provide male love-objects for their famous aunt. The absence of letters from 1801 to 1804 when she visited five or more resorts shrouds the possible romance from biographers – but not from creative fans.)

In her role as observer, the clear-eyed Charlotte less resembles the usual Austen heroine who matures through incidents and errors and more the foreigner or stranger used in satire to notice and comment on eccentric and perplexing native habits – or Lewis Carroll’s young, down-to-earth Alice trying to assess Wonderland with above-land tools. An older, more mature narrator bustles in at times to stress Charlotte’s inexperience and tendency to categorical judgement – a narrator far from the ‘impersonal’, ‘inscrutable’ one Virginia Woolf discovered in Austen’s work. A young woman of Charlotte’s age quite properly appreciates sexual interest and should enjoy the attentions of a handsome baronet, remarks the narrator. But mostly she lets us see through her heroine’s youthfully disapproving, sometimes intemperate eyes, so that we are led to laugh at a proliferation of herbal teas or a cautious consideration of butchers’ meat and servants’ wages, without hesitating to wonder if this is wise.

Jane Austen had just been revising her old novel Northanger Abbey when she began Sanditon. In her character as judge and observer, Charlotte is almost the reverse of the earlier heroine since she assumes rationality in the irrational, where Catherine Morland does the opposite. The people whom Charlotte mostly watches are not young men and women competing for marriage partners but the speculating pair behind the resort’s creation: her host, the enthusiastic Mr Parker, and Lady Denham, the local great lady with ‘many thousands a year to bequeath’ and three sets of relatives courting her. Parsimonious and mean, she is also, like so many women in Austen’s novels, cannier in money matters than the men around her.

Among the arriving visitors to Sanditon are Tom Parker’s siblings, two vigorously invalid sisters and a third brother, the indolent, guzzling Arthur, who has caught the habit of ill health like an infection from his sisters. With gusto the trio self-diagnose and self-medicate, and together they form a droll commentary on the new leisure pursuit of hypochondria and invalidism which the eldest brother Tom Parker is exploiting.

Plot incident is promised through the circle of toadies round Lady Denham. These include two rivals for the widow’s unusually disposable property: the impecunious heir and nephew by marriage, Sir Edward, the ‘remnant’ of a second husband, and Clara, a distant relative chosen over nearer kin to be Lady Denham’s companion.

The usual assumption was that quixotic girls (like Catherine Morland of Northanger Abbey, and Lydia Languish in Sheridan’s The Rivals and Arabella in Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote before her) were most susceptible to fiction, but, from her juvenile tales through to Sanditon, Jane Austen knew men were just as likely to be overwhelmed. In Love and Freindship, written when she was fourteen, Sir Edward discovers his son, another Edward, has a head filled with ‘unmeaning Gibberish’ from sentimental novels, while a second Sir Edward in Sanditon is addled by sensational romance (Austen was a frequent recycler of names and motifs). Both young Edwards are prey to precisely the kind of fiction she herself does not write but towards which some of her less acute supporters tried to steer her by suggesting more ‘incident’. In Sanditon, Sir Edward intends to provide ‘incident’ by being what Austen termed ‘a very fine villain’. Misreading and misusing literature, he proposes to be a charismatic rake in the line of Lovelace, who rapes the virtuous heroine in Samuel Richardson’s huge tragic novel Clarissa of 1748, surely an outdated libertine model for a young man of 1817 when the most celebrated society seducer would have been Lord Byron – although Byron rarely needed Lovelace’s violence.

‘Mixing a Recipe for Corns’, George Cruikshank, 1819

Illustration depicting Lovelace molesting Clarissa

To fulfil his wicked ambition, Sir Edward proposes to abduct the beautiful Clara out of the clutches of Lady Denham. He fancies a solitary house near Timbuctoo to take her to – in fact all he has on offer is his own damp property and the tourist cottage he is building on Lady Denham’s waste ground. The fragment trails off before Sir Edward can act or Clara can resist.

Charlotte thinks Sir Edward ‘downright silly’, though he is not alone in seeing Clara Brereton through the gauze of literary melodrama or gothic: Charlotte too refers to Clara as a ‘character’ and a ‘heroine’ in a story. The put-upon ‘humble companion’ was a stock figure of female novels of the time and, with her beauty, poverty and dependence, Clara seems to Charlotte ripe for such a literary role.

Beyond any single person, in Sanditon the seaside resort is subject and centre of the novel – and Mr Tom Parker is almost synonymous with it:

Sanditon was a second wife and four children to him — hardly less dear — and certainly more engrossing. — He could talk of it for ever. — It had indeed the highest claims; — not only those of birth place, property, and home, — it was his mine, his lottery, his speculation and his hobby horse; his occupation, his hope and his futurity.

It has invaded his mind so that he can boast with crazy sincerity that its sea air and bathing are ‘healing, soft[en]-ing, relaxing — fortifying and bracing — seemingly just as was wanted — sometimes one, sometimes the other.’

An Austen family tradition has as the intended title of the fragment not the seaside resort itself but ‘The Brothers’. The suggestion has some merit since, as far as the twelve chapters can tell us, the three Parker brothers, Tom, Sidney and Arthur, will form interesting contrasts throughout the story. Such a masculine title and such a dominant theme of male relationships would, however, be as much a break with the six complete novels as the comically exaggerated characters appear to be.

Jane Austen does describe close relationships between men – Darcy and Bingley in Pride and Prejudice, the Knightley brothers in Emma – but she doesn’t much dwell on them and there are far more depictions of women together, especially sisters when these are congenial.

In her life too, outside the hazy heterosexual romances, Jane Austen reveals close ties with women, her sister Cassandra of course, but also with cheerful, kindly Martha Lloyd, called ‘friend & Sister’, with whom, she, Cassandra and their mother lived most of the time from 1805 until Jane’s death; the Bigg sisters, the lifelong friendship with whom survived the debacle of Jane’s one-night engagement to their brother Harris Bigg-Wither; her two eldest nieces, Fanny Knight and Anna Austen; and two women below her own gentlewoman status, Anne Sharp, Fanny’s often ailing governess at Godmersham – her ‘sweet flattery’ of Jane’s writing success made her ‘an excellent kind friend’ – and Madame Bigeon, a French emigrée and Henry Austen’s housekeeper, to whom she left £50 in her will. In the fragment of Sanditon, the most intriguing female relationship is that between the poor companion Clara Brereton and the patroness Lady Denham.

Within Jane Austen’s immediate family there are also close relationships between Jane and her five brothers, though they differ in intimacy. It is least evident with Edward, the most distant in circumstance and place – the only one whose name is used in the novel (for the predatory baronet) – most with Henry, of whom there are more descriptions in her surviving letters. With the eldest James, she shared a love of reading and writing, and she had huge respect and affection for Frank and Charles and fascination for their adventurous naval careers. In Sanditon, whatever might have been intended for the finished novel, in the part we have the dominant family players are not the three brothers but the enthusiastic, addicted brother-and-sister pair, Tom and Diana Parker. If the work should be named after family members at all, it might perhaps best be titled ‘The enthusiasts: Thomas and Diana Parker’.

Both siblings are mocked for this enthusiasm, and also for their shared desire to surround themselves with company. Although sociable, especially in her last years Jane Austen relished periods of solitude, times when she was ‘very little plagued with visitors’, when she might enjoy ‘quiet, & exemption from the Thought & contrivances which any sort of company gives’. Tom and Diana are eager for company of all sorts at all times, Diana imagining and scheming for visitors and Tom Parker seeing the whole of Sanditon as a kind of house party, only successful if crammed – he had wanted to bring all the Heywoods with him to Trafalgar House. In this he is heir to Sir John Middleton in Sense and Sensibility and Mr Weston in Emma, whose desire for company frequently exceeds that of their more discerning guests.

For a fictional plot to develop, however, a houseful of guests and frequent comings and goings have many advantages.

Jane Austen in Sanditon

If the grotesque portraiture of the twelve chapters differs from the characterisation in the mature novels, it has much in common with that in the wacky, clever and surreal little tales the child Jane wrote to delight her family in the Steventon rectory, amusing them by using their names in stories and dedications. In fact, her enthusiam for rollicking humour and parody did not end with childhood; a compulsive bent, it surfaced throughout her life in her private writings. It is expressed in shared literary spoofs, comic poems, and often in intimate letters. The fiction she wrote in her last housebound months may in part be intended, like her juvenile writings, to amuse her family.

None of Jane Austen’s mature heroines quite resembles her creator, though each reflects some of her qualities: her wit and moral temperament, for example, as well as her social circumstances. With her sceptical approach to life, yet her enjoyment of fiction, Sanditon’s Charlotte Heywood may seem close to aspects of Jane Austen, but she is too undeveloped – and perhaps prim – for much identification.

A more bizarre but closer fit is Mr Parker’s spinster sister, Diana, much given to the imaginative and leisure activity of heroic invalidism. Austen mocks her mercilessly, quoting at length the garrulous account she writes to her brother cataloguing her and her siblings’ sufferings and her deluded, energetic do-gooding, which Charlotte terms ‘Activity run mad’. But Diana also has her author’s doggedness, her resilience and brilliance at fantasy, an ability to remake herself and the world around her, whatever the setback; she is allowed to rattle on and wander from topic to topic rather as Jane Austen herself often does in her intimate letters, and she, like Jane, lives in Hampshire. Chillingly, E. M. Forster, the novelist and great admirer of Jane Austen’s finished work, suggested the resemblance when he compared the writer of Sanditon to a ‘slightly tiresome spinster, who has talked too much in the past to be silent unaided’.

Jane Austen’s nephew and first lengthy biographer, James Edward Austen-Leigh, was dismayed by his aunt’s surviving letters when he read them; he found them trifling. Charlotte too, contrary to Mr Parker’s expectation, is not charmed by Diana’s desultory epistolary style. Yet Jane Austen knew that most of the business of keeping separated families together depended on women sending letters, written whether or not there were any exciting incidents to report. In Northanger Abbey Henry Tilney pretends gallantly to support female superiority in letter-writing, while, more sincerely, Mr Parker is grateful to his sister Diana for writing often, when his brother Sidney does not.

Despite roundly mocking her, Jane Austen shares ailments with her character. Diana Parker’s ‘old grievance, spasmodic bile’, is close to her creator’s: just before beginning Sanditon, Jane wrote, ‘I am more & more convinced that Bile is at the bottom of all I have suffered, which makes it easy to know how to treat myself.’ To her list of supposed medical jargon in Sanditon, ‘anti-spasmodic, anti-pulmonary, anti-septic, anti-bilious and anti-rheumatic’, the term ‘anti-bilious’ was added later. Diana moaned that she could ‘hardly crawl from her bed to the sofa’: Jane Austen admitted she was now ‘chiefly on the sofa’.

Perhaps the vigour with which the hypochondriacal Diana Parker conquers her bilious disorder is a wish fulfilment of the truly sick Jane Austen (equally wish-fulfilling might be her comfortable situation, for Diana is well-provided for where her author is not). Also, mocking bodily infirmity, even if chiefly imaginary, might have helped Jane herself ward off any tendency to self-pity and petulance: ‘generally speaking it is [human nature’s] weakness and not its strength that appears in a sick chamber,’ she noted in Persuasion.

Outside fiction, Jane Austen found the hypochondriac more irritating than comic. She described a distant relative as ‘the sort of woman who gives me the idea of being determined never to be well – & who likes her spasms & nervousness & the consequence they give her, better than anything else’. Nearer home, she may have found another example of hypochondria: reading between the lines, we might hear occasional exasperation with her mother and her ‘complication of disorders’, about which she was rarely silent. Mrs Austen survived her daughter by a decade.

Jane Austen’s robust attitude to her own health or sickness, her tendency to believe in the remedies of brisk walking and rhubarb, made her sometimes unsympathetic to other sufferers. Her friend Anne Sharp experienced dreadful migraines and eye problems; unlike Jane, she sought extreme and new-fangled medical cures, including a painful suture in the nape of her neck, electrodes to her head and the cutting off of all her hair. Possibly she persisted because she knew that continued ill health would ruin her modest job prospects – doubting her friend’s fantasy that she might marry a relative of her rich employer. Herself ailing by 1816, Jane Austen was irritated into sarcasm by Anne’s frequent complaints of ill health and naïve optimism about people and cures: ‘she has been again obliged to exert herself more than ever – in a more distressing, more harrassed state – & has met with another excellent old Physician & his Wife, with every virtue under Heaven who takes to her & cures her from pure Love & Benevolence …’ Sympathy returned, and Jane wrote her last letter from Chawton to her ‘dearest Anne’, saying farewell and describing with ‘all the Egotism of an Invalid’ her own appalling symptoms.

Beyond ill health, Diana Parker echoes her creator by being a house-hunter. Following her father’s death, Jane, Cassandra and their mother began a nomadic life, primarily dependent on the brothers for income, moving from lodgings to ever cheaper lodgings in Bath – then for a while staying with brother Frank and his family in Southampton, a port and spa (in Jane’s childhood writings notable for its ‘Stinking fish’). Until they came to live in Chawton in 1809 with Edward’s help, they had no settled home. A search for a home is one of the perennial themes of all the novels and it is an irony of her subsequent reputation that in later years Jane Austen was regarded as pre-eminently the novelist of stability and home. But not even Edward was secure and, when Jane was writing Sanditon, he was suffering a lawsuit which threw doubt on his claim to his huge estates, one of which included the Chawton cottage.

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.

Mrs Austen’s rich brother James Leigh-Perrot and his wife Jane were childless, and it was always understood that his estate in due course would come to his sister’s children but that, if his death preceded his wife’s, there would be immediate legacies for the needy Austens. Eleven days after Jane Austen stopped writing Sanditon, Thomas Leigh-Perrot died. To the great disappointment of the Austens, he left everything to his wife for her lifetime – and this despite their standing by her during the murky incident when she was accused of shoplifting and faced transportation for the crime. ‘I am ashamed to say that the shock of my Uncle’s Will brought on a relapse,’ Jane wrote. ‘I am the only one of the Legatees who has been so silly, but a weak Body must excuse weak Nerves.’

If she were indeed suffering from Addison’s disease, as many suppose, this added stress would have been hugely detrimental; she herself was aware that ‘agitation’ could be as harmful as fatigue. Possibly in the portrait of Lady Denham and her treatment of her poorer relatives, there was something of the whimsical and mean selfishness Jane Austen saw in aunt Jane Leigh-Perrot. (A modern critic, straying into gothic mode, finds Lady Denham an early example of the childless ‘rich lesbian vampire’, who collects husbands and property and preys on sick or poor young women.)

One of the reasons for Thomas’s decision – unmentioned by Jane Austen – may well have been the Leigh-Perrots’ anger at losing a large sum of money through the bankruptcy of Jane’s speculating banker brother, Henry Austen.

Henry and Jane

Henry benefited mightily from the long Napoleonic Wars. At first intended for the Church like his eldest brother James, he had instead joined the local militia, soon becoming paymaster and agent. He resigned his commission in 1801 and set up business as a banker in London, partnering local banks in Kent and Hampshire, one in the market town of Alton, very close to Chawton. He was also connected to small country banks in a couple of speculative inland spas: Buxton in Derbyshire and Horwood Well Spa in Somerset. The wartime economy helped all his projects with its huge defence spending as well as import restrictions which kept agricultural prices high – advancing the interests of his main customers, the landowners, though not of the urban or rural poor.

Jane was pleased at the prosperity enjoyed by her charming, witty and sanguine brother. She admired, loved and indulged him, rejoicing at his successes and sympathising in his setbacks. She stayed often with him in London, where one of his lodgings was above his bank in Henrietta Street. There she met his lively friends and colleagues and witnessed his financial activities. She attended the theatre with him and even came to the notice of the Prince Regent – whom she heartily despised. Hearing that Henry had been invited to the season’s most desirable social event in 1814, the ball at White’s Club celebrating the (temporary) allied triumph over Napoleon, she exclaimed, ‘O what a Henry!’

Yet, for all her supportiveness and admiration, she would have been painfully aware that as a woman she had none of Henry’s opportunities to increase her own modest income. Perhaps in this respect Lady Denham with her own money and speculating choices is wish-fulfilling, rather like Diana Parker with her conquerable sickness and private income.

In one area of course Jane could enter the marketplace: through her writing, though not easily without male sup port. Henry advocated his sister’s work, made connections with publishers and saw her novels through the press. With his help she speculated in publication by not selling most of her copyrights outright, the unfortunate exception being Pride and Prejudice, which would have brought her most money. She loved the ‘pewter’ she earned: ‘I have written myself into £250 which only makes me long for more,’ she wrote. Just after she penned the last words of Sanditon, she received nearly £20 for the second edition of Sense and Sensibility. It gave her a ‘fine flow of Literary Ardour’.

But her earnings were always modest. Especially unfortunate was the decision not to sell copyrights of her later novels to her final publisher John Murray: as a result, she earned little from Emma, since the losses on Mansfield Park’s second edition were set against its profits. It had not been a successful speculation.

In 1815 the battle of Waterloo ended the Napoleonic Wars and England was at peace for the first time in twenty-two years. After initial rejoicing and jollity came inevitable disappointment. The effect of peace on the economy was huge: financial and social adjustment, even depression, wracked the country. Through Henry, Jane now had firsthand experience of market volatility: his wartime prosperity was over. In 1815 the Alton bank was already struggling: it collapsed in March 1816. The rest of Henry’s businesses failed in a welter of debts. He lost his home and possessions and was declared bankrupt.

Henry Austen as Rector

With her other siblings, Jane showed no distaste at Henry’s murkier dealings, for patronage, nepotism and dependence on the great were part of the family background. Little blame seems to have been cast on the always charming brother, though he took his family down with him. Especially hit were Edward and uncle James Leigh-Perrot, the first owing £20,000 and the second £ 10,000. Jane herself lost £26. 2s, part of the profits from her writing. After their father’s death, the Austen brothers had clubbed together to provide a small income for their sisters and mother. After the crash, little of this could be paid.

Despite such huge losses, Henry’s optimism and vitality were undimmed. He returned to his original life-plan and took Holy Orders. Jane Austen was impressed by his resilience, a quality she gave in spades to her speculator Mr Parker.

Can speculative capitalism be good?

Jane Austen wrote Sanditon in the winter and spring following the famous dark summer of 1816. Away in Switzerland under the gloom, Mary Shelley invented her monster and Byron his vampire. The pall over Europe was caused by the eruption of Mount Tambora more than 7000 miles away. The volcano spewed out gas and particles that hid the sun; temperatures dropped, crops were blighted. Hunger was widespread.

In England landowners who had flourished under wartime protectionism made the situation worse by banding together to pass corn laws against cheap imports, ignoring the principle of free trade and the needs of a hungry population. No accident that the poor who come to the attention of Tom and Diana Parker required subscriptions from the better-off to keep afloat.

Jane Austen’s characters are all in various ways defined by money. Indeed, her novels’ tendency to dwell on the economic side of life startled the poet W.H. Auden, who described them in his poem as revealing

so frankly and with such sobriety

The economic basis of society.

‘Letter to Lord Byron’

In her fiction we learn that the dowager has her jointure, the widow her allowance, the heir his expectations, the rich girls their dowries, the poor their scrambling needs, the warriors their prizes and the peacetime officers their half pay. We know who is landed and who funded by means of investments in government stock, and whose fortune comes from trade or an ancestor’s clever speculation. In short, we know what most characters are worth.

There is much to spend on. Emma displays a traditional economy whose basic commodities are produced locally and circulated: apples and the hind-quarter of a pig travel from the wealthy to the poor, and gifts of meat, fruit and craft are exchanged among equals. Yet there are also particulars of fashionable and leisure items brought in from outside the region. These come to the fore in Sanditon; added to which, even the most necessary foodstuff is here bought and sold for money. Once self-sufficient from his own estate, Mr Parker now pays for much of the produce and meat he needs in this new commercial economy.

Regency England was afloat with consumer goods through ‘the demand for everything’, as Mr Parker puts it. Fictional Sanditon, like the real seaside resorts, was full not only of new and unfinished buildings but of all manner of expensive things that marked status and answered whims: dresses, lace, straw hats, shoes, fancy boots, bonnets, gloves, books, camp stools, harps and carriages. The whole town is for sale and to let, and visitors are consumers who must make it flourish – Charlotte feels obliged to buy something when she enters the local subscription library and trinket shop which sells ‘all the useless things in the world that could not be done without’.

Etching by Thomas Rowlandson from Poetical Sketches of Scarborough, 1813

Even people may become saleable items: Sidney Parker, the most dashing of the Parker siblings, is a useful attraction for displaying girls and their scheming mothers. The rich ‘half mulatto’ Miss Lambe, an heiress from the West Indies, is desirable as both a paying visitor and as prey for one of the town’s needy bachelors – such as Sir Edward.

Glorious British victories of the Napoleonic Wars were speedily commercialised – war tourism to Waterloo was established almost before the dead were cold; their bones were collected and sold as souvenirs. The names of battles dwindled from being patriotic achievements to become adornments, embellishing new houses, terraces and squares of peaceful England. By 1817, the naval battle of Trafalgar, which had meant so much to Jane Austen through her sailor brothers, had lost cultural, even decorative, caché through relentless exploitation. It had been replaced by the more recent Waterloo, the bubble of whose fame would likely be popped long before Mr Parker was dead. As it is, he regrets that, just a year before Waterloo, he had named his new property Trafalgar House and saw it become almost instantly out-of-date.

Although four of the complete novels – viz Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park and Persuasion – have financial mismanagement at their core, uniquely in Sanditon the topic of national economy is widely discussed, as it was throughout England in these years. Debates raged in pamphlets and books, in taverns and private homes, concerning profit and loss, capital and property, wealth and paper credit.

In his pioneering work of capitalist theory, The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith stressed the idea that the pursuit of self-interest can benefit society generally. Yet many doubted that the greed and extravagance of the rich would benefit those below them, that wealth inevitably trickled down and that capitalist activity and consumption were good for all. Satires noted that the extravagant and dissolute lifestyle of the Prince Regent in his elaborate pavilion in Brighton failed to improve the lot of the town’s deprived inhabitants.

James Gillray, ‘John Bull ground down’, 1795

Other debates concerned speculation and types of capitalism. Can what is now called neoliberalism work for everyone in society or will it benefit only the few? Is speculation inevitably precarious? Is profit alone ever a worthy motive? Would the country prosper most under a laissez-faire system or should there always be welfare and paternalistic controls, so that development does not despoil an organic community? How does the constant need to buy new things, to enjoy purchasing then throwing away, impact on society and its traditional crafts? How does consumption affect morality? Under the urge to buy and sell, will the country dwindle into tourist haunts and shopping malls?

The Empire too was controversial. Was the home economy skewed by wealth coming from the colonies or was the Empire a drain on the Mother Country?

The characters in Sanditon debate these questions from their differing social positions – though they resemble each other in all being well-to-do. The traditional, stay-at-home landowner Mr Heywood (who however has his London investments paying ‘dividends’) is kind and welcoming to a stranger of his class, but he keeps the lower orders in their place. He leaves lanes beyond his house unpatched and his tenant cottages, pretty enough on the outside, unmodernised. Change erodes class divisions, he believes, and disturbs the tested ways of the past. The new resorts are bad for everyone because they cause inflation: they raise prices and ‘make the poor good for nothing’.

Mr Parker, the traveller and projector, disagrees with this reactionary view. He accepts the working of the market place: it may disturb the old order, turning traditional fishermen and farmers into commercial sellers, but the new economy in the long run will benefit all. He believes in what Adam Smith had termed ‘the invisible hand’, that capitalist activity can benefit all. When the rich spend, they ‘excite the industry of the poor and diffuse comfort and improvement among them’. Rich and poor are symbiotic: butchers, bakers and traders cannot prosper without ‘bringing prosperity to us’. In many respects, however, Mr Parker remains an old-fashioned gentleman and his capitalism is tempered. The rich have a duty to support the unfortunate poor, and he cares for and patronises his unsuccessful traders as once he cared for the tenants on his estate.

His partner, ‘mean-spirited’ Lady Denham, sides with Mr Heywood, wanting to retain the privilege, status and security of the old order. In her sitting room, Sir Harry Denham, baronet, has a full portrait in pride of place over the mantelpiece, while the untitled but moneyed Mr Hollis is present only in miniature. At the same time, she supports Mr Parker through greed, being avid for the spoils of the new order. Like Mr Heywood, she worries about inflation, believing that visitors raise prices of local produce. Propelled by ‘calculation’ and desire for instant profit, she opposes any move of Mr Parker’s that does not instantly bring in money or which has indirect consequences. A doctor in town would not simply attract invalids but also let servants and the poor fancy themselves ill. As Charlotte primly comments, Lady Denham degrades and makes mean those who depend on her – much like the inconstant and rich Mrs Ferrars in Sense and Sensibility.

Where did Jane Austen stand in the debate on speculation? The answer would depend on what fate she was proposing for Tom Parker of Sanditon. Perhaps he was heading for a crash, ominously foreshadowed in the opening pages by his overturned carriage. The very name of Sanditon recalls Jesus’s parable of the builders, in which the wise man builds a house on rock and the foolish one on sand, only to see it swept away by wind and water. The Parkers in their cliff-hugging Trafalgar House have already been rocked by storms unfelt in the valley. In the context of Jane Austen’s Anglican world view, it might have been better if Mr Parker had been seeking a parson for his unstable new town rather than a surgeon when he insisted on pushing his hired horses up the treacherous road in Willesden.

The two previous books Jane Austen wrote, Persuasion and Emma, both concern landowners and stewardship and subtly connect them with national stability. Given the criticism of Persuasion’s Sir Walter Eliot as a poor landlord who lets out his ancestral home, and praise for Mr Knightley, the good, traditional one in Emma, it might seem that Mr Parker, who has abandoned and rented out his family estate, set like Donwell Abbey in a sheltered valley (‘a hole’ Mr Parker calls it with ominous disrespect), is in the line of spendthrift Sir Walter.

Without a conclusive ending, where ideological clarity is often found and subversive tendencies summarily reined in, we cannot be certain. Perhaps Mr Parker is not intended as simply the butt of conservative satire. His energy is attractive, and the real sense of change and new order that blows through fresh and sparkling Sanditon makes Jane Austen’s view equivocal. The wind buffeting the cliff-top houses and deterring the timid lifts the spirits of those energetic enough to brave it – and, in Persuasion, similar sea wind restores bloom to the cheeks of drooping Anne Elliot. Although nothing suggests financial success for Sanditon, if Mr Parker does face a crash, perhaps he might be helped by his individually solvent siblings, especially the wealthy Sidney – rather than taking them down with him, as Henry had done his family. If Jane’s beloved brother is pressing against the character, it is hard to imagine generous, open-hearted and reckless Tom Parker quite humbled or condemned for his delusions.

The passion for salt water

The British love affair with sea cures began in earnest in 1753 with Dr Richard Russel’s A Dissertation on the Use of Sea-Water in the Diseases of the Glands. Believing in nature as the best healer, it claims that sea bathing eases stiff joints and helps against tuberculosis, leprosy, venereal diseases and ulcers. Sea water has the healing qualities of ‘Saltness’, ‘Bitterness’,‘Nitrosity’ and ‘Oilyness’.

By ‘bathing’ is not meant ‘swimming’, especially enjoyed by men and boys, but ‘dipping’ for a minute or two in the cold sea water from a horse-drawn wooden box or machine. This dipping for health was undertaken by both sexes, especially if they were ‘lax fibred’. For ladies, the box had a canvas modesty hood to avoid anyone seeing the bather. The contraption cost a shilling to hire and was trundled, rather uncomfortably, into the sea. Inside the box, the lady – a gentleman could dip in the nude – changed from ordinary clothes into a flannel bathing costume, attended by a ‘dipper’ who might well be fierce in ‘helping’ her patient put her body into the freezingly cold sea to ‘charge the system’.

From mid-century on, claims for sea bathing accelerated: Dr Robert Squirrel declared it efficacious for ‘Indigestion, Gout, Fever, Jaundice, Dropsy, Haemorrhages, Violent Evacuations, or any other disorder’, while ‘inspiring’ or breathing sea air recovered health more than breathing anywhere inland. The literature dwelt on miracles. A Mr Sanguinetta, paralysed from the head down, took regular dips at Margate, then ‘threw away his second crutch, and walked with a cane, took up his German flute and played’. He fathered seven children.

Coloured etching by William Heath, c. 1829

Nearer home, Jane Austen’s glamorous cousin Eliza de Feuillide, future wife of Henry Austen, carried her ailing young son to Margate for a cure in December and January, having been told that ‘one month’s bathing at this time of the Year was more efficacious than six at any other’. Remarkably, the child survived: ‘The Sea has strengthened him wonderfully & I think has likewise been of great service to myself, I still continue bathing notwithstanding the severity of the Weather & Frost & Snow which is I think somewhat courageous.’ Although it is summer in Sanditon, delicate Miss Lambe from the West Indies will still find the sea immensely cold when she finally goes through the box into the water, with vigorous Diana Parker beside her to ‘keep up her spirits’.

After half a century of seaside puffing, some medical men tried to moderate the fantastic claims for sea water. In A View of the Nervous Temperament, Dr Thomas Trotter mocked doctors who exploited illness for their own gain. Sea bathing, he wrote, was primarily ‘an exercise and amusement’, good perhaps only for nerves. Mrs Bennet, literature’s most famous possessor of nerves, believes she would be ‘set up with a little sea bathing’ in Brighton.

An engraving by R. and D. Havell from an original by George Walker: bathing at Bridlington, 1813

The supremely healthy Charlotte Heywood agrees with Dr Trotter: she enjoys sparkling Sanditon but has no need for any ailment, and by the end of the fragment has not tried sea bathing. Robust Lady Denham avoids doctors, blaming them for killing off her second husband, and is never rhapsodic about the sea. She too of course wants to benefit from sickness in others: offering her remedies of asses’ milk and an exercise chamber horse left over from her first husband.

Indeed, almost everyone in Sanditon aims to profit from the invalid or healthy body. Mr Parker seeks a doctor as a tourist attraction for his seaside resort, though, unlike Lady Denham, he does believe in the therapeutic value of sea air and bathing: he expects good breathing and ‘immersion’ to put him to rights after his carriage accident. Visiting Mrs Griffith, allowing modest sea bathing for her richest young lady, prescribes only those pills and drops in which a cousin has a commercial interest. In poems and puffing medical manuals, medicinal sea bathing could even sound useful for seduction; albeit praising the waters of the Hudson River, Samuel Low declared that ‘the fair from thy embrace more lively shall retire/And that which cools their own, their lovers’ breasts shall fire!’ Had the manuscript been longer, perhaps the egregious Sir Edward would have had time to find amorous profit from female bathing, and tune his compliments accordingly.

‘Venus Bathing in Margate’ attributed to Thomas Rowlandson. Nude swimming was in fact very uncommon for ladies

The seaside resort

Today, with so many rundown resorts around the coast of England, it is tempting to glamorise the earlier quaint fishing-village with its heroic night fishermen and welcoming wives in tidy cottages, and grow nostalgic for an older way of life – the sort epitomised for the upper orders by the stay-at-home Heywoods. The poet William Cowper, a favourite author of Jane Austen’s, looked on the new developments through conservative eyes. He believed such jumped-up places ruined old crafts through a fashion for novelty, making visitors prey to shoddy amusement, to morbid restlessness and to quacks:

But now alike, gay widow, virgin, wife,

Ingenious to diversify dull life,

In coaches, chaises, caravans, and hoys,

Fly to the coast for daily, nightly joys.

And all impatient of dry land, agree

With one consent to rush into the sea.

from ‘Retirement’

Contemplating the mushrooming sea resorts, the reforming journalist William Cobbett drily remarked that they had no commerce or agriculture, no purpose beyond catering for migrants’ pleasure and so were ‘very pretty to behold; but dismal to think of’ – all metaphorically built on shifting sand, all sanditons. The money to sustain them must derive from outside, from other parts of Britain or from the Empire. More sustained ridicule came from Thomas Skinner Surr: in The Magic of Wealth (1815), he described a rich banker Flimflam creating ‘Flimflam-town’ to become ‘a magnet of Fashion’, with the help of sidekicks Puff and Rattle. The book mocks the ‘trafficking spirit of the times’ that has replaced the stationary gentry values of Mr Oldways. The resort project crumbles and Mr Flimflam goes bankrupt – rather of course like Henry Austen.