There are no (known) surviving manuscripts of Austen’s published novels (apart from two chapters of Persuasion), and so the digitised version of the Sanditon manuscript gives readers a unique opportunity to look at Austen’s fiction as work in progress, and to examine how she revised and rethought her writing as she worked. Sanditon wasn’t published until 1871, 54 years after Austen’s death there was no published edition seen into print by Austen herself, and so the manuscript constitutes our only evidence of how she viewed and approached her final novel. Thanks to an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project, based at the University of Oxford, it’s possible to view the manuscript of Sanditon online. Here are five reasons why this fragment is an important and original part of her body of work, and why it’s more than worthy of readers’ time. Sanditon is nowhere near as widely known as the published novels, and it’s strikingly different from Austen’s other writing. Rather than discussing any of Austen’s (extremely popular) six published novels, though, the essay focuses on Sanditon, the unfinished novel on which she was working during her months of illness before her death in July 1817. I’ve just published an essay on Jane Austen in the journal Nineteenth-Century Literature.
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