Jane Austen's Sanditon

Sanditon is Jane Austens 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 ground-breaking essay, Todd contextualizes Austens life and work, Sanditons connection with Northanger Abbey (1819) and Emma (1816), Jane Austens insecurity of income and home, and the Austen familys financial speculations. She examines the works 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, Sanditons characters follow intuition and bodily signs), she shows Austens 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.