“Sanditon” is robust, unsparing, and alert to all the latest fashions in human foolishness. Illustration by Rutu Modan

On March 18, 1817, Jane Austen stopped writing a book. We know the date because she wrote it at the end of the manuscript, in her slanting hand. She had done the same at the beginning of the manuscript, on January 27th of that year. In the seven weeks in between, she had completed eleven chapters and slightly more than nine pages of a twelfth—some twenty-three thousand five hundred words. The final sentence in the manuscript runs as follows: “Poor Mr. Hollis!—It was impossible not to feel him hardly used; to be obliged to stand back in his own House and see the best place by the fire constantly occupied by Sir H. D.” This is a joke. Mr. Hollis and Sir Harry Denham are dead, and it is their respective portraits that contend for social eminence in the sitting room of Lady Denham, the woman who married and buried them both. Exactly four months after writing that line, Jane Austen died, unmarried, at the age of forty-one. Her position, unlike theirs, remains secure.

Austen was the seventh child of a country rector. The family was well connected but not wealthy. Of her six mature novels, four were published in her lifetime, and none bore her name on the title page. The one she left dangling is known as “Sanditon,” although she assigned it no title. Nor did her beloved sister Cassandra, when she copied the manuscript, long after Jane’s demise. A nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh, refers to it simply as “the last Work,” in “A Memoir of Jane Austen” (1871)—still the first port of call for biographers, despite its erasure of anything that might evoke the impious, the unsavory, or the quarrelsome. “Her sweetness of temper never failed,” he writes. Never? A week after “Sanditon” came to a halt, Austen wrote, in a letter, “Pictures of perfection as you know make me sick & wicked.” That note of exasperation is worth attending to, as we approach the bicentenary of Austen’s death, this summer. The hoopla will be fervent, among the faithful, and both the life and the works will doubtless be aired afresh on our behalf. In part, however, the shape of that life is defined by its winding down, and by the book—an unsweet and unlikely one, still too little known—that sprang from her final efforts.

Not until 1925 was “Sanditon” made available to the public. (It is still in print; try the Penguin edition, with a fine introduction by Margaret Drabble.) The response was mixed, with E. M. Forster posing the questions, in a review, that have dogged the book ever since. “Are there signs of new development in ‘Sanditon’? Or is everything overshadowed by the advance of death?” Forster, diagnosing “the effects of weakness,” leaned to the latter view: “We realize with pain that we are listening to a slightly tiresome spinster.” He should know. The truth is the opposite of what Forster proposes. Although—or precisely because—“Sanditon” was composed by a dying woman, the result is robust, unsparing, and alert to all the latest fashions in human foolishness. It brims with life.

Something new is afoot at the start of “Sanditon.” Austen is matchless in her openings, but none of them sound quite as eventful as this:

A gentleman and lady travelling from Tunbridge towards that part of the Sussex coast which lies between Hastings and East Bourne, being induced by business to quit the high road, and attempt a very rough lane, were overturned in toiling up its long ascent—half rock, half sand.

Overturned! Not until Chapter 12 of “Persuasion,” the last novel that Austen completed, do we come upon any such impact—Louisa Musgrove, tumbling and hitting her head. Here we are, however, greeted at once by a toil and a smash. In the manuscript, the phrase “half rock, half sand” has been added as an afterthought, and, as we read on, that geological blend—the reliably hard and secure compounded with the dangerously shifting—takes on the texture of a premonition.

The couple in the carriage are Mr. and Mrs. Parker, who live in the seaside resort of Sanditon. They have come out of their way to find a doctor—not for themselves but as a useful addendum to Sanditon’s delights, upon which Parker likes to expostulate, to the exclusion of every other theme:

He could talk of it for ever.—It had indeed the highest claims;—not only those of birth place, property, and home,—it was his mine, his lottery, his speculation and his hobby horse; his occupation, his hope, and his futurity.

We are in the presence of a bore: one of those men whose minds have battened on an idée fixe and mislaid their sense of balance in the process. As a landowner, Parker wants to cash in on the ever-rising fad for a coastal existence and for the bodily benefits that it is rumored to bestow.

The carriage crash leaves him with a sprained ankle. The ideal treatment, of course, would be a dose of Sanditon, but, for now, he and his wife take refuge with an amiable family called the Heywoods. The plot begins to stir. It is agreed that, once the Parkers resume their journey, they will take with them the Heywoods’ eldest daughter, Charlotte. For her, it will be an improving adventure and a change of scene; for Austen, it will provide someone who can cast a cool eye on the varieties of witlessness that flutter, like a row of flags, beside the shore.

In common with other desirable locations in Austen’s world, Sanditon is populated by those who seem welcoming. What matters is the speed at which the seeming wears off. Lady Denham is the grande dame of the place, by virtue of “many thousands a year to bequeath, and three distinct sets of people to be courted by.” In other words, her relatives must grovel before her in the hope of an inheritance, and she relishes her power. Cordial at first blush, she contrives to be both high-handed and tightfisted—concerned about having too many guests, because that would mean extra labor for her housemaids, who might in turn demand higher wages. “Thus it is, when rich people are sordid,” Charlotte reflects, in silence.