Like Northanger Abbey and Mansfield Park, it begins by translating the heroine, Charlotte Heywood, to a place where she can enter a story. The fragment introduces an array of smart, silly and ludicrous characters. The world of Sanditon is absurd, unsettled and unsettling. 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. In contrast to the earlier novels about great houses and rural villages, Sanditon’s 12 chapters do not describe a tight country society but a developing coastal resort full of restless traveling people-the novel becomes an exuberant comedy not of organic community but rather of bodies whose weaknesses are delivered with zest. 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.
We know that she was dying, she could not be sure.
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.įrugal 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). The final date signified that Jane Austen would write no more novels. 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.įor 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. However weak her body-and she wrote some passages first in pencil, being unable to cope with a pen-clearly her spirit was robust. Was there ever a fragment like Jane Austen’s Sanditon? 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.
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