Jane Austen's Sanditon. Janet Todd

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