| Author | Jane Austen |
|---|---|
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Romantic novel |
Publication date | 1817 |
| Media type | Print (hardback & paperback) |
| Text | Sanditon at Wikisource |
Sanditon (1817) is an unfinished novel by the English writer Jane Austen. In January 1817, Austen began work on a new novel she called The Brothers, later titled Sanditon, and completed eleven chapters before stopping work in mid-March 1817, probably because of illness.[1] R.W. Chapman first published a full transcription of the novel in 1925 under the name Fragment of a Novel.[2]
The novel centres on Charlotte Heywood, the eldest of the daughters still at home in the large family of a country gentleman from Willingden, Sussex. The narrative opens when the carriage of Mr and Mrs Parker of Sanditon topples over on a hill near the Heywood home. Because Mr Parker is injured in the crash, and the carriage needs repairs, the Parkers stay with the Heywood family for a fortnight. During this time, Mr Parker talks fondly of Sanditon, a town which until a few years before had been a small, unpretentious fishing village. With his business partner, Lady Denham, Mr Parker hopes to make Sanditon into a fashionable seaside resort. Mr Parker's enormous enthusiasm for his plans to improve and modernise Sanditon has resulted in the installation of bathing machines and the construction of a new home for himself and his family near the seashore. Upon repair of the carriage and improvement to Mr Parker's foot, the Parkers return to Sanditon, bringing Charlotte with them as their summer guest.
Upon arrival in Sanditon, Charlotte meets the inhabitants of the town. Prominent among them is Lady Denham, a twice-widowed woman who received a fortune from her first husband and a title from her second. Living with Lady Denham is her niece Clara Brereton, a sweet and beautiful yet impoverished young lady. Also living in Sanditon are Sir Edward Denham and his sister Esther, nephew and niece to Lady Denham by her second husband. The siblings are poor and are thought to be seeking Lady Denham's fortune; Sir Edward is described as a silly and very florid man, though handsome.
After settling in with the Parkers and encountering various neighbours, Charlotte and Mr and Mrs Parker are surprised by a visit from his two sisters and younger brother, all of whom are self-declared invalids. However, given their level of activity and seeming strength, Charlotte quickly surmises that their complaints are invented. Diana Parker has come on a mission to secure a house for a wealthy family from the West Indies, although she has not specifically been asked to help. She also brings word of a second large party, a girls' school, which is intending to summer at Sanditon. This news causes a stir in the small town, especially for Mr Parker, whose fondest wish is the promotion of tourism there.
With the arrival of Mrs Griffiths at Sanditon, it soon becomes apparent that the family from the West Indies and the girls' school group are one and the same. The visitors consist of Miss Lambe, a teenaged Antiguan-English heiress, and the two Miss Beauforts, English girls just arrived from the West Indies.[3] In short order, Lady Denham calls on Mrs. Griffiths to be introduced to Miss Lambe, the sickly and very rich young woman that she intends her nephew, Sir Edward, to marry.
A carriage unexpectedly arrives bearing Sidney Parker, the middle Parker brother. He will be staying in town for a few days with two friends who will join him shortly. Sidney Parker is about 27 or 28 years old, and Charlotte finds him very good-looking, with a decided air of fashion.
The book fragment ends when Mrs Parker and Charlotte visit Sanditon House, Lady Denham's residence. There Charlotte spots Clara Brereton seated with Sir Edward Denham at her side having an intimate conversation in the garden and surmises that they must have a secret understanding. When they arrive inside, Charlotte observes that a large portrait of Sir Henry Denham hangs over the fireplace, whereas Lady Denham's first husband, who owned Sanditon House, only gets a miniature in the corner — obliged, as it were, to sit back in his own house and see the best place by the fire constantly occupied by Sir Henry Denham.
The people of "modern Sanditon", as Austen calls it, have moved out of the "old house – the house of [their] forefathers" and are busily constructing a new world in the form of a modern seaside commercial town. The town of Sanditon is almost certainly based on Worthing, where Jane Austen stayed in late 1805 when the resort was first being developed. There is persuasive evidence that the character of Mr. Thomas Parker was inspired by Edward Ogle, Worthing's early entrepreneur, whom Jane Austen and her sister Cassandra knew.[4][5][6][7] Sanditon is, however, less of an actual reality than an ideal of the inhabitants – one that they express in their descriptions of it. These inhabitants have a conception of the town's identity and of the way in which this identity should be spread to, and appreciated by, the world:
My name perhaps... may be unknown at this distance from the coast – but Sanditon itself – everybody has heard of Sanditon, – the favourite – for a young and rising bathing-place, certainly the favourite spot of all that are to be found along the coast of Sussex; – the most favoured by nature, and promising to be the most chosen by man.
— Sanditon
Because Austen completed setting the scene for Sanditon, it has been a favourite of "continuators" – later writers who try to complete the novel within Austen's vision while emulating her style. Such "completed" versions of Sanditon include:
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