Jane Austen's Sanditon: With an Essay by Janet Todd

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. David Alan Williams The title, authorship and far famed editor would alone grant this profound, delightful, useful, original and informative volume entitlement to a five-star rating. The light of a positive multiverse of stars is hidden under what must therefore be a considerable bushel. The excellent essay, is illustrated on a scale, big enough to be useful, mostly in full colour. The selections from Rowlandson, Gillray and Cruikshank in particular give the book the appearance of being a series of appropriately saucy seaside picture postcards to us from Jane Austen's Sanditon. By putting the manuscript into its proper historical, cultural, social, political, artistic, and not least her personal and family contexts, the essay reveals the complexity and originality of what Jane Austen was attempting in writing Sanditon. The book concludes with an overview of the significant continuations and completions of Sanditon, including film and television adaptations that have yet to appear, and even appeals for more. To all Austen/Sanditon enthusiasts, and many more possibly aspiring to join them, this book is surely nothing less than indispensable. Lastly Fentum Press are to be congratulated on the quality of the book production. There is a finely judged balance, even a physical one, between the essay and the text of Sanditon. The book size chosen causes it to fall naturally into the hand. There is a pleasant correlation between mass and weight. Therefore, of all of the editions of Sanditon that I possess, this is the one which I now find to be the most enjoyable to read. (The Ebook) is also illustrated in full colour. It works very well on Kindle Fire, Kindle for PC, IPad and Android Tablets, and on laptops. The illustrations are larger than in the hardcover version, and just as much fun.