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. Unlike the heroines of Northanger Abbey and Mansfield Park, Charlotte is not deposited in a great house to cope with bullying or tyrannical inmates. Jane Austen had just been revising her old novel Northanger Abbey when she began Sanditon. 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 14 children. It overturns, and the crash gives him a sprained ankle. 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. 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.Ĭharlotte Heywood’s translation comes about through an accident. 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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