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Sanditon is Jane Austen's last novel, unfinished when she died in 1817.
A comedy, it continues the strain of burlesque and caricature she wrote as a teenager and in private throughout her life.
In her introductory essay, Janet Todd contextualizes Austen's life and work, Sanditon's connection with Northanger Abbey (1819) and Emma (1816), Jane Austen's insecurity of income and home, and the Austen family's financial speculations.
She examines the work's discussion of the moral and social problems of capitalism, entrepreneurship, and growing tourism, and their effect on traditional values and rural communities. Todd explains the early nineteenth-century culture of self: the exploitation of hypochondria, health fads, seaside resorts, and miracle cures. Arguing that Sanditon is an innovative, ebullient study of human beings ' vagaries (rather than using common sense, Sanditon's characters follow intuition and bodily signs), she shows Austen's themes to be akin to contemporary concerns about self-obsession and the culture of narcissism, as well as a comic study of the gap between how we think of ourselves and how we appear and sound to others.
Janet Todd
Janet Todd is a novelist and internationally renowned scholar, known especially for her biographies of women writers. She is an expert in her field in the long 18th century and has published books on Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, Samuel Richardson and Aphra Behn. After working as an academic around the world, Janet now lives in Cambridge and Venice.
10 Keats Grove,
Hampstead,
Greater London,
England,
NW3 2RR.
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