Jane Austen’s first eleven chapters of Sanditon remained unfinished at her death on 18 July 1817; it was completed in 1975 by Another Lady. As I started to read it, I was apprehensive that modern sensibilities would creep in where they don’t belong, and that the collaborator’s precision of language would fail to match Austen’s standard. Caught by the story, I had no need to worry. In some ways the collaborator brought broader detail to the novel with her knowledge of seaweed and seashells and lighting of London by gas-light; if anything, these notions would have been outside Jane’s normal purview and, hence, incongruous to her oeuvre. At one point, late in the novel, Charlotte, our heroine, takes up the reins of a gig and starts to turn it in the road: it is an act not impossible, but unlikely in an Austen story. This and other events are inevitable when there is a separation in time of a century and a half between the starting and finishing of a novel. All this should be insignificant to the devotee of Jane Austen, for it is enjoyment of the story that matters more than ungrateful carping over minor details. Austen’s collaborator succeeds in capturing the feel of the English seaside resort, a feel that is still present, and of the surrounding countryside in summer.

At the seaside instead of bathing-machines there are now beach-huts where people sit in deck-chairs, some in the shade of an umbrella, reading, chatting, and drinking tea while enjoying the sights and sounds of the sea. There are municipal gardens, souvenir shops, tea-rooms, restaurants, and temporary accommodations overlooking the esplanade. In the hinterland there are plenty of walks along footpaths across fields much as they were when Jane Austen was alive, though now there are fewer hedgerows and bigger fields.

Jane Austen is a good author to have at hand on one’s travels. Her world provides reassuring stability when one is in an unstable state of transition. When travelling, there is little incentive to do much other than read.