Sanditon

"Sanditon was begun in early 1817 and left unfinished when she died in July of that year. She completed eleven chapters, though, which give us a fair idea of the book’s plot and themes. A carriage accident at the start introduces the protagonist Charlotte Heywood to a Mr and Mrs Parker, who are from a seaside town called Sanditon. Until recently, this place was a small fishing village, but with the investment of Mr Parker and others, it is quickly being transformed into a fashionable watering place, full of invalids and hypochondriacs who have come to stay there for the ‘cure’ offered by the fresh sea air and various local quacks. Once the Parkers are recovered, they invite Charlotte to return home with them to experience Sanditon for herself, where she finds a community of quarrelling, selfish people obsessed with their own health. It’s much more bitingly satirical than Austen’s previous fiction, I think, and it’s truly a shame that we will never know how she intended to develop the ideas further. It’s also fascinating to think about how the book’s subject matter intersects with her own life. Austen’s mother, Cassandra Leigh Austen, was well-known in the family as a hypochondriac, so the author was writing Sanditon from personal experience. And at the time when she started writing it, Jane herself was already unwell with the illness that would, six months later, take her life. As Austen biographer Claire Tomalin puts it: “What other fatally ill writer has embarked on a savage attack on hypochondria?” It’s a remarkable piece of fiction for a dying woman to write. Pride and Prejudice was first published in 1813, which is right at the point when lots of competing theories about how the mind and the body interact are being debated by the scientific community. William Harvey’s work on the circulation of the blood had inspired other ideas about what might be flowing around the human body, and thoughts ranged from a kind of ‘vapour’ that moved around inside us, to mysterious ‘animals spirits,’ to fibres or ‘nerves’ that delivered information to the brain. “Mrs Bennet’s nerves represent much more than just the emotional disregulation of a silly woman” Hypochondria was also right the point here of transitioning from being considered wholly a condition of the body—the ‘hypochondrium’ was a term for an area of the upper abdomen and ‘hypochondria’ was disease experienced there—into being a problem felt in the mind, as we know it today. Less than a decade after Austen’s novel appeared, the French doctor Jean-Pierre Falret published a pivotal book that declared hypochondria to be an entirely mental condition. “Moral and intellectual causes are, without contradiction, the most usual causes of hypochondria,” he wrote. All of which is to say, Mrs Bennet’s nerves represent much more than just the emotional disregulation of a silly woman. The palpitations and flutterings and faintness she experiences in moments of great emotion or distress are actually a major point of medical debate at the time, as well as being crucial to a greater understanding of how the human body works."