‘The terrific Grandeur of the Ocean in a Storm, its glass surface in a calm, its Gulls and its Samphire, and the deep fathoms of its Abysses, its quick vicissitudes, its direful Deceptions, its Mariners tempting it in sunshine and overwhelmed by the sudden Tempest’. They are the beginning of a new story, a departure from the rural village settings of the earlier novels, stepping (or even diving) into new waters – an aspiring seaside resort full of cliffs, dunes, beaches and of course the sea itself.Ī passage in which the dashing Edward Denham speaks of the sea seems to describe all the drama, flux and excitement of a thrilling novel: They represent what could have come next, had Jane Austen survived her fatal illness.
The opening chapters of Sanditon, written in the first few months of 1817, are a precious, tantalising and frustrating fragment.
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