Sanditon is Jane Austen's last novel, unfinished when she died in 1817.
A comedy, it continues the strain of burlesque and caricature she wrote
as a teenager and in private throughout her life. In her ground-breaking
essay, Todd contextualizes Austen's life and work, Sanditon's
connection with Northanger Abbey (1819) and Emma (1816), Jane
Austen's insecurity of income and home, and the Austen family's
financial speculations. She examines the work's discussion of the moral
and social problems of capitalism, entrepreneurship, and growing
tourism, and their effect on traditional values and rural communities.
Todd explains the early nineteenth-century culture of self: the
exploitation of hypochondria, health fads, seaside resorts, and miracle
cures. Arguing that Sanditon is an innovative, ebullient study of human
beings ' vagaries (rather than using common sense, Sanditon's
characters follow intuition and bodily signs), she shows Austen's
themes to be akin to contemporary concerns about self-obsession and
the culture of narcissism, as well as a comic study of the gap between
how we think of ourselves and how we appear and sound to others.