Why We Needed to Save Sanditon

The prospect of being interrupted by death must have haunted every author except Emily Dickinson, who seems to have always been prepared to leave a hanging dash. The 19th-century novelist Elizabeth Gaskell died right before she finished the final installment of her masterpiece, Wives and Daughters, leaving readers with the immortal last words, “And now cover me up close, and let me go to sleep, and dream about my dear Cynthia and my new shawl!” Great authors are unfortunately not all known for their longevity, nor did they all leave the best records and dictates upon their death (Kafka ordered The Trial burnt). Charles Dickens managed to leave readers exactly halfway through his only true whodunit, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, meaning we have a disappearance and a lot of suspicious behavior but will never catch the culprit. But Dickens was at least kind enough to provide us with enough reading material to last a lifetime, whereas Jane Austen preferred to keep her novels slim and few. So it is thus that her last and unfinished novel Sanditon continues to be the Austen that got away.

Austen died in 1817, leaving 11 completed chapters of Sanditon. Austen was appreciated as a novelist while she lived and continued to gain both popularity and critical acclaim steadily throughout the 19th century. It wasn’t until the turn of the 20th century, however, that she began to gain the sort of mass appeal she can now claim. In 1905, Henry James noted the infatuation Austen readers evinced, attributing it to effective marketing and,

…the stiff breeze of the commercial, ... the special bookselling spirits. ... the body of publishers, editors, illustrators, producers of the pleasant twaddle of magazines; who have found their 'dear', our dear, everybody's dear, Jane so infinitely to their material purpose, so amenable to pretty reproduction in every variety of what is called tasteful, and in what seemingly proves to be salable, form.

In 1921, the novelist Georgette Heyer began to write the first of an extensive series of romance novels set in Austen’s England, an act that inspired a million imitations, innovations, and intimations. A hop, skip, and a jump in time and smut-level, and you’ve got Bridgerton. But peeking out from behind Bridgerton’s sequined ballgowns is the second season of an adaptation/reimagining/completion/extension of that holy grail of Austenites everywhere: Sanditon. The adaptation mostly finishes out the novel’s storyline by the end of the first episode and then imagines the rest based on Austen’s characters and setting, sometimes taking the series to places Jane herself may not have dared go. The first season of Sanditon aired in the UK in August of 2019 in eight parts and was canceled before it aired in the U.S. in January of 2020. And so, as that fatal year 2020 took its first steps, Austenites everywhere already felt their own brand of sorrow: Austen’s unfinished novel was now an unfinished series.

When television networks cancel a series, especially one that is only likely to appeal to a limited audience, they very seldom change their minds. Firefly fans know this pain acutely, and they are one of the few success stories out there. Deadwood had to wait 13 years for an ending; most canceled shows never even get that. With cancellation, you’re lucky if you get a movie a few years later that wraps up your storyline and lets your fans get some closure. Yet somehow, Sanditon was brought back from the dead and given two full new seasons, despite the fact that the main love interest would not be returning and despite the fact that much of the filming would need to take place under strict COVID guidelines. Had the studios finally grown a heart? Did they see the outpouring of passion from the newly formed “Sanditon Sisterhood” and shed a tear of regret? There’s no way to prove otherwise, so I’ll happily throw that into the mix, but the most likely reasoning is the unprecedented success of Bridgerton, which descended from the heavens on Christmas Day 2020 on a cloud of glitter and sex and money. Bridgerton, remember, is something like Jane Austen’s bright incomprehensible granddaughter. She may be dressed in sequins instead of muslin and she’s definitely wearing Britney Spears’ Curious perfume, but she has Austen’s laugh and her raised eyebrow and her smile.

The Sanditon fandom went into full battle mode almost immediately upon the show’s debut in the U.S. They took to social media, creating a detailed schedule outlining when their fans should post, what keywords they should use, and who they should tag and when. They commissioned a sand painting on the beach where most of the filming for the show took place. They were indefatigable and full of hope. I joined them a few months in, tweeting out how much I had loved the series and lamenting the injustice of cancellation; within minutes I was inundated with dozens of greetings, well-wishes, and virtual embraces from the rest of the community. It remains one of my few truly joyful Twitter interactions. The news Sanditon would rise again came first in a series of whispered rumors that once confirmed, sent the Austenites into ecstasies. Even the loss of our heroine’s broody love interest couldn’t dampen our enthusiasm. After all, when Austen needed to shake up her heroine’s love lives she knew what to do: call in the militia.

I’ve come a long way in this piece without answering the question posed by my title, so I’ll repeat it here: why did we need to save Sanditon? Was it to right the wrongs of indifferent death? To snatch a happy ending from the jaws of mortality? Austen is surely spinning in her grave I would even pose such a question, let alone in such gothic language. Was Sanditon the novel even worth saving? The critic Peter Washington, in his introduction to the 1996 Everyman edition asserted that, if finished, it could have been her greatest novel. That’s a very sweet assertion, but really? I’ve read it, and I’m more inclined to agree with E.M. Forster’s take:

The fragment known to Miss Austen’s family as Sanditon is of small literary merit, but no one is to blame for this; neither the authoress, who left it a fragment, nor the owner of the MS., who has rightly decided on publication, nor the editor of the text, who has done his work with care and skill… Jane Austen is here completely in the grip of her previous novels. She writes out of what she has written, and anyone who has himself tried to write when feeling out of sorts will realize her state. The pen always finds life difficult to record; left to itself, it records the pen. The effort of creating was too much, and the numerous alterations in the MS. are never in the direction of vitality.

I think it is easy to see everything Austen wrote as equally meritorious because to be an Austenite is to regard her as something of a literary goddess. She is so much more than the sum of her novels; she is now also Colin Firth emerging from the fishpond, linen shirt plastered to his chest. She is a themed tarot deck and the movie Austenland and so many misquotations. She is the older sister I, a bookish only child, turned to for advice on being a good woman, good sister, good wife.

Here’s Forster again,

I AM a Jane Austenite, and therefore slightly imbecile about Jane Austen. My fatuous expression, and airs of personal immunity— how ill they set on the face, say, of a Stevensonian! But Jane Austen is so different. She is my favourite author! Tread and re-read, the mouth open and the mind closed. Shut up in measureless content, I greet her by the name of most kind hostess, while criticism slumbers. The Jane Austenite possesses little of the brightness he ascribes so freely to his idol. Like all regular churchgoers, he scarcely notices what is being said.

Of most interest to us, she is her adaptations. We can never get from her a completed Sanditon, but we are capable of writing a new story using old bones. There were enough scraps left, of merit variable, to give us a new version of Sanditon that was worth saving. There were enough people who watched brave Charlotte Heywood get dumped at the end of season one and decided we couldn't just leave her there. We needed to save Sanditon because cut off from community and family, feeling sick and afraid, we could try to just fix one goddamn love story.

Season two of Sanditon premieres on March 20, 2022.