Jane Austen's Sanditon. Janet Todd

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