Sanditon and Other Stories: Introduction by Peter Washington [Hardcover]

Readers of Jane Austen’s six great novels are left hungering for more, and more there is: the marvelous unpublished manuscripts she left behind, collected here.

Sanditonmight have been Austen’s greatest novel had she lived to finish it. Its subject matter astonishes: here is Austen observing the birth pangs of the culture of commerce, as her country-bred heroine, a foolish baronet, a family of hypochondriacs, and a mysterious West Indian heiress collide against the background hum of real-estate development at a seaside resort.

The Watsons, begun in 1804 but never completed, tells the story of a young woman who was raised by a rich aunt and who finds herself shipped back to the comparative poverty and social clumsiness of her own family.

The novellaLady Susanis a miniature masterpiece, featuring Austen’s only villainous protagonist. Lady Susan’s subtle, single-minded, and ruthless pursuit of power makes the reader regret that Austen never again wrote a novel with a scheming widow for its heroine.

The special joy of this collection lies in Austen’s juvenilia–tiny novels, the enchantingly funnyLove and Freindship, comic fragments, and a (very) partial history of England–romping miniatures that she wrote in her teens. Their high spirits, hilarity, and control offer delicious proof that Austen was an artist “born, not made.”

“[In her earliest writings] we see the essential Austen . . . There is a force behind Austen’s farce–an energy which demands expression, an irony which will not be refused, a distinctive vision of life already apparent in the teenage writer . . . What grips one about the early works at every turn is the wit, the fire, the voice, the comic distance Austen sets up between herself and her fictional characters . . . Lady Susan is a classic, andSanditonmight have been Austen’s greatest book, had delĂ2