Sanditon E-Book

Jane Austen.

• Herausgeber: Hesperus Press Ltd.
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 133

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Charlotte Heywood is privileged to accompany Mr and Mrs Parker to their home in Sanditon &mdash not least because, they assure her, it is soon to become the fashionable epicentre of society summers. Finding the town all but deserted, she is party to the machinations of her socially mobile hosts in their attempts to gather a respectable crowd. As Sanditon fills with visitors, Austen assembles a classic cast of characters possessing varying degrees of absurdity and sense. The last of Austen&rsquos fictional works, written in the year before her death when she was gravely ill, Sanditon affords a glimpse of the ultimate creative powers and preoccupations of one of the greatest figures in English literature.

Leseprobe

Sanditon

Jane Austen

Foreword byA.C. Grayling

Hesperus Classics

Published by Hesperides Press Limited

167-169 Great Portland Street, W1W 5PF London

www.hesperus.press

First published in 1925

First published by Hesperus Press Limited, 2009

eBook edition published in 2025

Foreword © A.C. Grayling, 2009

ISBN (paperback): 978-1-84391-184-5

ISBN (eBook): 978-1-84391-329-0

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.

Contents

Foreword

A.C. Grayling

Sanditon

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Notes

Biographical Note

Foreword

A.C. Grayling

Sanditon was the last of Jane Austen’s fictional works. She began writing it on 27th January 1817, and ceased work on it just under two months later, on 18th March, part of the way through the twelfth chapter. She died a mere four months after that, on 18th July 1817, aged forty-two. It is thought that she died of Addison’s disease, a disorder of the adrenal glands often secondary to tuberculosis. In light of one of the main themes of Sanditon, namely illness or supposed illness, it is relevant that the symptoms of this once-fatal disease begin by being consistent with hypochondria, only after a while becoming evidence of serious decay. Addison’s is a rare condition in which the adrenal glands produce insufficient natural steroids, with the result that the body cannot cope with inflammation. Its symptoms are exhaustion, weakness, feelings of faintness on standing up, headaches, backache – and these of course could be mere ‘vapours’ produced by lack of exercise and over-eating, or by nervous sensibility, or the onset of menopause.

But then the disease progresses to vomiting and diarrhoea, sweating, weight loss, salt cravings, painful joints, and marked personality change. Evidently Jane Austen was using – and satirising – as material for her novel what in the earlier phase of her illness she perhaps thought were her own ‘vapours’, along with the then increasing barrage of advertisements for seaside health cures. And alas, what she robustly mistook for something that common sense would help her survive was, instead, the harbinger of death. It makes the theme of imaginary ill health in Sanditon all the more poignant and telling.

It is a tragedy that literary genius of Jane Austen’s proportions should have had so little time to express itself. Although she began to write early, completing what came to be called Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice in the 1790s, they were not published until 1811 and 1813 respectively. So Austen’s career as a published author was very short – a mere six years, in which her sense of her powers as a writer was confirmed both by the critical and financial success of her work, and her own creative outpouring: Mansfield Park was begun in 1811 as Sense and Sensibility was first appearing on the booksellers’ shelves, and as soon as it was finished in 1813, with Pride and Prejudice just being published, she began Emma, finishing it a year later (it was published in 1815) and immediately starting Persuasion, which was completed in the autumn of 1816. From the fact that she set to work on Sanditon just a few months later, at the beginning of 1817, it is clear that she was on what we nowadays called ‘a roll’, and an extraordinary one. It is a loss merely to imagine what else her increasingly prolific gift might have produced had she lived.

Jane Austen made her will on 27th April 1817, at last suspecting or acknowledging that she was seriously ill. She had both Persuasion and Northanger Abbey – the latter written long before, several times offered to publishers without success, and revised and renamed more than once – in press during that summer, so it is easy to imagine how pregnant with work she must have felt, and aware of how cruelly she was being cut short in the midst of her gifts.

Add to this the signs in Sanditon that something a little new was entering Jane Austen’s vintage style and concerns – on this, more below – and the poignancy of her loss to literature is complete: she had so much more to do and say, and she was moving with the times when her time ran out.

It is tempting to describe Sanditon as simultaneously the most modern and the most eighteenth century of all Jane Austen’s fictions. It is eighteenth century in aspects of its language, most notably the frequency of balanced periods reminiscent of the styles of Dr Johnson and Edward Gibbon. For three examples: Sanditon is economically described as a seaside town ‘the most favoured by nature, and promising to be the most chosen by man’; the character of the life enjoyed by Mr and Mrs Heywood is conveyed in the words, ‘What prudence had first enjoined, was now rendered pleasant by habit’; Lady Denham tells a friend, ‘though she had got nothing but her title from the family, still she had given nothing for it’. The economy and authority of these literary mannerisms, quite consciously employed, were doubtless an enjoyment to Austen; she knew they would be recognised and equally enjoyed by people who, like herself, had cut their reader’s teeth on the novels, essays and poetry of the eighteenth century in which they had been young. The manner is not new in her writing, but in this fragment it appears more deliberate, as if to point the irony felt by the author in her commentary on the new world she describes.

Sanditon is also eighteenth century in its reliance on letters, reminding one of Lady Susan, Jane Austen’s first fictional work, wholly written in epistolary style after the manner of the author who was her greatest inspiration, Samuel Richardson. Although only a short fragment, Sanditon already contains the reading aloud of two important letters and seventeen others reported between the characters; no doubt plenty more – both mentioned and read aloud – would have been called into service of the plot. Only think: Sidney Parker – surely destined to propose to Charlotte on the last page – is first met with as he passes through Sanditon on his way to the Isle of Wight. He must write to his family from there. He is expecting the company of ‘one or two’ friends, one of them, surely, destined to have something to do with Clara Brereton: more letters loom. Diana Parker and her supposedly ailing siblings are due to return to London in a week, whither and whence more letters of interest to Charlotte, Sidney and others must flow. And at whatever point Charlotte returns to her family at Willingden, perhaps by then under the sad misapprehension that Clara (or perhaps the West Indian heiress Miss Lambe?) is the object of Sidney’s affections, she would be in need of many letters to keep track of affairs. How else, for example, would she (and we) know the progress of Sir Edward Denham’s relations first with Clara and then, surely, with Miss Lambe also? How would she know what Sidney had written to his siblings in London and his brother in Sanditon? How would she know what Lady Denham was proposing with respect to her will?

I repeat ‘surely’ so often because of course one cannot be sure what would transpire from the characters and circumstances so richly and promisingly assembled in the first twelve chapters of Sanditon. As Jane Austen fans we can make these guesses, and probably be more right than wrong; but there is the intriguing matter of something new in this novel, a hint that just as the world had moved on now that the long and exhausting war with France was over, so had Jane Austen herself.

And this brings us to the reason why Sanditon is the most modern of her writings. It is decidedly a post-war work, the new fashions and preoccupations of the world after Waterloo providing its background. Sanditon is a small seaside town whose two principal residents, the eldest Mr Parker and Lady Denham, are keen to make it a fashionable resort after the manner of others then growing in size and importance along the coasts of England. The medicinal properties of sea bathing and sea air had been a late eighteenth-century discovery, and the Prince Regent’s Pavilion at Brighton had put the seal of fashion on the gradual switch from spa resorts (Bath was the most fashionable but not the only one) to the seaside. For Jane Austen the rapid commercial growth of seaside resorts, the blurring of class lines (at Sanditon a commercially minded member of the minor gentry is on equal terms with a baronet and his father’s dowager), the abandonment of a snug house in a valley some miles from the sea in favour of a cliff-top new house exposed to the ocean’s blasts, are all matters for comment, not all of it unfavourable. The hill and cliff at Sanditon have a new row of terraced houses built over them, and a paved promenade; this is today’s world, not the world of Pride and Prejudice or Emma. Mr Parker and Lady Denham discuss their rents from the letting of summer lodgings; we are a thousand miles from Sir Walter Elliot of Kellynch Hall, though even he had to become a rentier to survive: but how differently it all feels in Sir Walter’s world – what a different kind of baronet he is.

Moreover, there is the manner in which Sanditon combines its modernity and its eighteenth century-ness: the strikingly frank way it addresses the question of sexual morality. Sir Edward Denham, under the influence of Richardson’s Lovelace, wishes to set himself up as a seducer. Jane Austen tells us quite explicitly that he plots the ruin of Clara, the poor relation of his stepmother Lady Denham. He has a practical motive too: he needs to inherit Lady Denham’s great wealth, because he is too poor for his station in life, and he is worried that she might leave her money to Clara. Therefore ruining her is a means of getting her out of the way. We are not told in these twelve too-brief chapters, but we might wonder, whether the alternative – namely, Sir Edward marrying Clara – was not open to him because of the disparity of their stations in life, and the fact that she was poor, there being no guarantee that Lady Denham would leave her much.

Sir Edward, then, is not a seducer quite like Sense and Sensibility’s Willoughby or Pride and Prejudice’s Wickham, but someone for whom – quite explicitly – despoiling a young woman is a planned option, even if in a rather hazy, not to say silly, gothic envisioning, which involves carrying Clara off to a cottage near Timbuctoo. True, Willoughby seduced Colonel Brandon’s ward Eliza and left her pregnant, but this is reported at a distance in Sense and Sensibility, not brought to the front of the stage as in Sanditon; and it is also true that Willoughby really loved Marianne and learns too late that he could have behaved with honour all along, and gained both her and his inheritance; but the stain of moral crime, in the universe of Austen’s published novels, typically derails individual lives, so we cannot be sure what fate awaits Sir Edward Denham for all that there is more both of the Lovelace and the popinjay in him than in either Willoughby or Wickham.

The morality play promised by Sir Edward’s thoughts is just one of the strands projected in the novel, as hypochondria and self-indulgence is another. But the real key to Sanditon lies in the fact that Jane Austen at first contemplated calling it The Brothers – meaning of course the three Parker brothers. The eldest is the good-natured, somewhat obsessive commercial developer of Sanditon, the youngest is the good-natured, fat, self-coddling, over-eating young man who lives with his sisters and will not contemplate an active and useful life. Chief of the three is the middle brother Sidney, obviously intended to be Sanditon’s hero, who will assuredly roll Darcy, Colonel Brandon and Mr Knightley into one (there is less in what we hear of him of Edward Ferrars or Edmund Bertram – that is, the quiet moral type). He will rescue Clara, aid Miss Lambe, be of service to the Heywoods in some way, and at last marry Charlotte – perhaps after helping her to correct her primness, rather as Mr Knightley helped Emma correct her meddlings, misperceptions and insensitivities.

The contrast between the brothers, the differences evident in their actions and fates as a result of the differences in their characters, therefore appears to be the major theme of Sanditon, and the rich palette of other characters and possibilities already apparent in the twelve chapters is clearly intended to paint these differences in vivid colours.

Sidney is well off, well bred, intelligent and witty, full of common sense, a traveller, an active and affectionate man – his relationship to his family and their fond reports of him show all this already. In this respect Sidney is portrayed as most of the characters in Austen’s published novels are portrayed: by being talked about, or shown in action. A big difference between Sanditon and Austen’s published novels is that so many of the characters are directly described; we are told, rather than shown, what their characters are. The languishing Lady Bertram, the valetudinarian Mr Woodhouse, the scatter-brained younger Bennett sisters, the proud Mr Darcy, the cheerful Mr Bingham, his unpleasantly artful sisters, the snobbish Lady Catherine, the oleaginous Mr Collins, the overwrought Marianne, the shrinking Fanny, the interesting and slightly dangerous Miss Crawford, are revealed to us by what they do and say, and by what others say. In Sanditon the majority of the characters are not revealed to us in this way; rather, we are given direct particulars of them, almost as if we were reading Austen’s own character sketches for them from her planning papers.

True, both Sir Edward and Lady Denham do some of the work for themselves in showing us what they are, as does Diane Parker. And so too of course does Charlotte, though as the observing authorial presence in what is just an opening section she has yet to show more of herself; so far she is most like Elizabeth Bennett, observant, down to earth, her cleverness and strength tempered by extremely good manners – but she also has a tincture of Fanny in her primness: witness how she turns the conversation to the weather when Sir Edward broaches the subject of how woman’s beauty prompts the male of the species to forego morality.

But these, with Sidney, are the exceptions. This is really a large difference of approach from the other novels, and it gives one pause for thought. I think Austen takes the tack of direct portrayal for a reason, namely, that the plot promises to be more complex, with more twists and turns, and with more players directly involved in the confusions and unhappiness that must presage resolution, so that a far more detailed working out is required. In the published novels the leisurely unfolding of character by showing rather than telling is a large part of the point of each book. Here – so one guesses – with so many fully developed actors on stage or just about to make their entrances, less room is given to character development so that there can be more room for events, for emotions to be roused and doused, and for the comedy of the situation to support the threat of tragedy, which we happily expect to be averted and resolved to general satisfaction.

Jane Austen was a careful plotter of her novels, which are dramas of feeling and the way feelings relate to the delicate tissue of moral justice. This relation works aright if the feelings in question are rational (in both senses of proportionate and thoughtful). The most explicit working out of this proposition occurs in Sense and Sensibility