Or maybe it took a few sleepless nights, not just one, but it happened over a very short time in July of 1816, just a year before her death, and somehow that ‘cancelled’ version remained in physical existence, when every other manuscript trace of the six mature novels has vanished. 1 For two different fine analyses of Austen’s manuscript of the cancelled chapters, see Kathryn Suthe (.)ģIn the case of the cancelled chapter, it is thought that, as with her proposal of marriage from Harris Bigg-Wither in 1802, Jane Austen said one thing, tossed and turned, and waked to change her mind.Smith prefigures the emotions of Jane Austen scholars over the centuries when faced with her fragmentary manuscript legacy.

Smith, late in that novel, expresses over the scanty paper trail left by her beloved husband on his death: ‘ “this happened to be saved while many letters and memorandums of real importance had been destroyed”’ (II ix 219). The survival of the cancelled chapter of Persuasion always makes me feel some of the woe that Mrs. Everyone will know that among the tantalizingly random scraps of Jane Austen’s writing is a chapter she wrote for the close of Persuasion and then dropped, replacing it with two more chapters which give us the end as we now have it. Then I want to talk about what it does have and since my title is about suspense, I will leave you in suspense for a while about those qualities.Ģ Sanditon is one of the few works which survive in manuscript in Jane Austen’s handwriting, but I’ll talk first about another surviving fragment, also in her own hand. Both of these novels, Persuasion which is so many people’s favourite, and Northanger Abbey, which has fewer adherents, but very fanatical ones, have things which poor little Sanditon does not, and I will be talking first about what it does not have, cannot have, at this stage of production, which is: rich and rounded characters, and that hard-to-define ‘air of reality’ which marks the great finished novels.

And because many people, even those who love Jane Austen’s novels, have not read it, or don’t know it well, I will also be talking about the novels everyone will know, and in particular the two that were published and read in the year of her death, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, brought out in a single volume as neither was quite long enough to suit the expectations of the readers of 1817. Chapman edited it for publication and gave it its title.

Sanditon was read by very few people before 1925 when the great Jane Austen scholar R. 1I will be talking to you today about Sanditon, the novel which Jane Austen started in the last year of her life but was unable to finish because she was too ill.

Sanditon jane austen book