Arguing that Sanditon is an innovative, ebullient study of human beings ' vagaries (rather than using common sense, Sanditon's characters follow intuition and bodily signs), she shows Austen's themes to be akin to contemporary concerns about self-obsession and the culture of narcissism, as well as a comic study of the gap between how we think of ourselves and how we appear and sound to others. Todd explains the early nineteenth-century culture of self: the exploitation of hypochondria, health fads, seaside resorts, and miracle cures. She examines the work's discussion of the moral and social problems of capitalism, entrepreneurship, and growing tourism, and their effect on traditional values and rural communities. It tells the story of Charlotte Heywood, who is transported by a chance accident from her rural hometown to. In her ground-breaking essay, Todd contextualizes Austen's life and work, Sanditon's connection with Northanger Abbey (1819) and Emma (1816), Jane Austen's insecurity of income and home, and the Austen family's financial speculations. Written in the last months of Austens life, Sanditon features a glorious cast of hypochondriacs and speculators in a newly established seaside resort, and shows the author contemplating a changing society with scepticism and amusement. A comedy, it continues the strain of burlesque and caricature she wrote as a teenager and in private throughout her life. Sanditon is Jane Austen's last novel, unfinished when she died in 1817.
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