Sanditon and Other Stories: Introduction by Peter Washington Hardcover - 1996

From the rear cover

When the English-speaking world fell in love with Jane Austen's six great novels, hungering for more, the hunt began, of course, for any unpublished manuscripts she may have left behind. Treasure was found, and all of it is in this volume that rounds out the Everyman's Library edition of Jane Austen. Sanditon is the novel she was working on in the last year of her life. Its subject matter astonishes: here is Austen observing the birth pangs of the culture of commerce. The setting is a seaside town that is being promoted as a resort. The country-bred heroine, the handsome baronet who models himself after irresistible seducers he has met in novels, the family of hypochondriacs, the mysterious West Indian heiress, and others, play out their satirical or romantic or melodramatic roles against a background hum of real-estate development: modern times loom. The Watsons, begun in 1804 but never completed, tells the story of a young woman, Emma Watson, who was raised by a rich aunt and is suddenly shipped back to the comparative poverty and social clumsiness of her own family: girls explicitly on the hunt for husbands. What husbands they find we will never know. But we can check our hopes that the appealing Emma will make the right choice (she is, incidentally, the only Austen heroine ever courted by a lord) against the author's plans for her, as recollected by Jane Austen's sister, Cassandra. Lady Susan, written before Pride and Prejudice, is a complete epistolary novel. It is Jane Austen's only novel whose protagonist is a villainess, and a denizen of sophisticated London society. The alluring Lady Susan subtly, single-mindedly, and ruthlessly pursues her own fortunes. She bullies her shyyoung daughter. She dissembles, she maneuvers, she manipulates. She makes the reader both pray for her comeuppance and regret that (as a modern novelist quoted in the preface remarks) Austen never again wrote a novel with a scheming widow for its heroine.

Media reviews

“[In her earliest writings] we see the essential Austen . . . There is a force behind Austen’s farce–an energy which demands expression, an irony which will not be refused, a distinctive vision of life already apparent in the teenage writer . . . What grips one about the early works at every turn is the wit, the fire, the voice, the comic distance Austen sets up between herself and her fictional characters . . . Lady Susan is a classic, and Sanditon might have been Austen’s greatest book, had death not prevented her from completing her final novel.” –from the Introduction by Peter Washington

Citations

• Harvard Business Review, 01/01/2010, Page 150