Forster posing the questions, in a review, that have dogged the book ever since. (It is still in print try the Penguin edition, with a fine introduction by Margaret Drabble.) The response was mixed, with E. Not until 1925 was “Sanditon” made available to the public. In part, however, the shape of that life is defined by its winding down, and by the book-an unsweet and unlikely one, still too little known-that sprang from her final efforts. The hoopla will be fervent, among the faithful, and both the life and the works will doubtless be aired afresh on our behalf. Never? A week after “Sanditon” came to a halt, Austen wrote, in a letter, “Pictures of perfection as you know make me sick & wicked.” That note of exasperation is worth attending to, as we approach the bicentenary of Austen’s death, this summer. “Her sweetness of temper never failed,” he writes. A nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh, refers to it simply as “the last Work,” in “A Memoir of Jane Austen” (1871)-still the first port of call for biographers, despite its erasure of anything that might evoke the impious, the unsavory, or the quarrelsome. Nor did her beloved sister Cassandra, when she copied the manuscript, long after Jane’s demise. The one she left dangling is known as “Sanditon,” although she assigned it no title. Of her six mature novels, four were published in her lifetime, and none bore her name on the title page.
The family was well connected but not wealthy.
Her position, unlike theirs, remains secure.Īusten was the seventh child of a country rector. Exactly four months after writing that line, Jane Austen died, unmarried, at the age of forty-one. Hollis and Sir Harry Denham are dead, and it is their respective portraits that contend for social eminence in the sitting room of Lady Denham, the woman who married and buried them both. Hollis!-It was impossible not to feel him hardly used to be obliged to stand back in his own House and see the best place by the fire constantly occupied by Sir H. The final sentence in the manuscript runs as follows: “Poor Mr. In the seven weeks in between, she had completed eleven chapters and slightly more than nine pages of a twelfth-some twenty-three thousand five hundred words.
She had done the same at the beginning of the manuscript, on January 27th of that year. We know the date because she wrote it at the end of the manuscript, in her slanting hand. On March 18, 1817, Jane Austen stopped writing a book. “Sanditon” is robust, unsparing, and alert to all the latest fashions in human foolishness.
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