Jane Austen's House of Friction

Abstract

An equivoque, pun, asyndeton, Sanditon is an intriguingly ambiguous, contradictory text—stylistically, thematically, materially, and biographically. It is a late text in Austen’s oeuvre, not only anticipating the modernist innovations of interior monologue and impressionism but also looking back to the theatrical effects and formal experiments of Austen’s youthful writings. It is the final work that plunges the rise of Austen’s novel—after the six major works—into the fall of the minor. It is a fragment that has sustained a long and busy afterlife of completions and continuations. Written probably to make money, at a time of multiple financial crises that threatened Jane Austen, her moth..