SANDITON - JANE AUSTEN

Sanditon (1817) is an unfinished novel by the British novelist Jane Austen.  

In Sanditon, Austen explored her interest in the verbal construction of a society by means of a town – and a set of families – that is still in the process of being formed. Austen began work on the novel in January 1817 and abandoned it on 18 March 1817. The manuscript for Sanditon was originally titled "The Brothers", likely after the Parker brothers in the story. After her death, her family renamed it "Sanditon". The original manuscript includes only the first eleven chapters of the story.

Austen was seriously ill when she wrote the opening chapters of Sanditon; she had less than six months to live. It is thus remarkable that the book is so fresh, innovative, and original. In her last completed novel, Persuasion, Austen had depicted how men of merit and small means could rise to affluence and position by means of service in the British navy. Sanditon builds on this theme, depicting the commercial development of a small watering place and the social confusion of its society (one character is a mulatto heiress from the West Indies).

Sanditon is bitingly witty. One character, in a manner reminiscent of Austen's much earlier novel Northanger Abbey, has read so many Gothic novels that he has convinced himself "that he was formed to be a dangerous Man." Austen's satire of the hypochondriac Parker sisters (who project their hypochondria on to their brother Arthur as well) is poignant in light of her own serious illness at the time.