Coming to PBS Masterpiece Classic soon! Gorgeous, profound, delightful,
useful, original, this fully illustrated, informative volume combines
Jane Austen's Sanditon novel and Janet Todd's ground-breaking essay.
"I so enjoyed Janet Todd's beautifully produced book." Andrew Davies,
screenwriter.
Sanditon is Jane Austen's last novel, left unfinished when she died. A
comedy, it continues the strain of burlesque and caricature she wrote as
a teenager and in private throughout her life. This beautifully
illustrated volume combines the full novel and Todd's ground-breaking
essay, where she contextualizes Austen's life and work, Sanditon's
connection with Northanger Abbey (1818) and the Austen family's
speculation in England and the West Indies. She examines the moral and
social problems of capitalism, entrepreneurship, and whether wealth
trickles down to benefit the place it is made. In explaining the early
nineteenth-century culture of self: the exploitation of hypochondria,
health fads, seaside resorts, cures, she contends that Sanditon is an
innovative, ebullient study of human beings' vagaries - rather than
using common sense, Sanditon's characters follow intuition and bodily
signs believing that desire can be translated into physical facts and
speech can transform fantasy into reality. Todd shows Austen's themes to
be akin to contemporary concerns: the mistakes of the self-deluded
reveal the inevitable, ridiculous gap between how we think of ourselves
and how we appear and sound to others.
