Jane AUSTEN : Sanditon

Charlotte Heywood is privileged to accompany Mr and Mrs Parker to their home in Sanditon – not least because, they assure her, it is soon to become the fashionable epicentre of society summers. Finding the town all but deserted, she is party to the machinations of her socially mobile hosts in their attempts to gather a respectable crowd, and Austen assembles a classic cast of characters of varying degrees of absurdity of sense.
The last of Austen’s fiction works, written in the year before her death, when she was gravely ill, Sanditon affords a glimpse of the ultimate creative powers and preoccupations of one of the greatest figures in English literature.

 

I do love Jane Austen. I had the opportunity, during the lock-in, to watch the series Sanditon, I read the novella a few years ago and it felt just weird. I had to re-read the book just to make sure of what had been or not been written.
So I did re-read it, which was fast (12 short chapters). Jane Austen wrote this but gave it up because she was dying and it was only published after her death. There is absolutely nothing to do with the TV show. I mean, it's pretty to watch, but it's so... XXIth century ! Sex, slavery and feminism ? And sexy, racy. Jane Austen wrote nothing like it.
The show sucked. Badly. But the "esquisse" of the novel itself was not bad at all, I just wish she had the time to finish it, which feels so sad. The plot is here, so are the characters, roughtly, but then she died and what is there to do ? Certainly not watch the show. If you're looking for a pretty TV adaptation, maybe you'll like it. If you are true to Jane Austen, you will bang your head against the walls as I did.
The plot is here. The characters appear. On paper. And then she died. It's so sad. She died young, when you compare with her family, but she did die and what can you do ? Read the beginning and imagine the rest, but hopefully avoid the tv-show. And dream about what could have been.