iainsan

Sadly, Jane Austen was unable to complete her last work and 'Sanditon' or 'The Brothers' as she first called it, ends abruptly after 11 chapters. The story is just getting interesting at this point, making this loss to literature all the more poignant. No doubt Austen would have revised and polished the work when she completed it; some sentences in the early chapters are wordy and convoluted even for her and the Kindle version suffers from a complete lack of paragraphing, which does not assist clarity. However, there are some excellent flashes of Austen's satirical wit: much fun is poked at several characters who suffer from hypochondria, one character's literary tastes are total pretentious nonsense and doctors are heavily criticised in an amusing way. Although the reader does not get to meet her, the novel promises the presence of the only non-white character in the Austen canon [described as being 'half-mulatto]. All this made me regret that we only have about a quarter of the book and serves as a reminder of what a tragedy Jane Austen's early demise certainly was.