Jane Austen Corrected
Somehow Lengthened. By Alice Cobbett. (Bonn. 7s. 6d.) GIVEN a fledgling Sussex seaside resort in 1817, with an amiable landowner to cluck over its progress ; given a sensible twenty-two-year-old heroine, by name Charlotte, staying there with the amiable gentleman and his wife ; given a dozen or so visitors and residents, a bewitching and unprotected young girl, and a baronet who regarded seduction as a duty ; given, in fact, Jane Austen's fragmentary last work, Sanditon—what is to be done about it ?
The most sensible answer seems to be, " read it." It is admirable Jane Austen, although it was written in the year of her last illness and death, and could, unhappily, be neither revised nor completed. Miss Cobbett, however, offers another answer : re-write it. I can see no good reason for doing this, except that it provides Somehow Lengthened with characters and a starting-point. If anything must be done to Jane Austei's novels, there is much in favour of a spirited finish, such as that provided three or four years ago to The Walsons, by Edith and Francis Brown, which astonishingly continues the charm of the original ; but Sanditon, " somehow length- ened is not Sanditon at all. Miss Cobbett treats her original with a deferential unscrupulousness, admiring it all, and altering the greater part of it. To reach the end she wishes, the beginning has to be retold. It is hard to improve on Jane Austen. There is certainly no determining how Sanditon would have continued, and we can all form our own theories. Miss Cobbett makes Somehow Lengthened hinge on the abduc- tion which was clearly foreshadowed. She hides the lovely Clara among taciturn East Sussex smugglers : provides a contrary wind to prevent Sir Edward from taking her on a Byronic cruise ; sends Charlotte and her host's brother to attempt her rescue : and brings in Lady " Westborough," the mother of Lady Caroline " Lammington " (to whose Glenarvon, it is significant, her heroine is partial) to put things right by frank melodrama.
This is all very interesting, but what has it to do with Jane Austen 't The author of Persuasion would not need to evolve such a plot ; and, when four of Sanditon's leaders of fashion suddenly disappeared, would the inhabitants of Jane Austen's Sanditon have remained inactive and unperturbed ? Miss Cobbett scarcely improves on her models by making the expli- citly liberal Lady Denham miserly and ill-bred, the West Indian young lady of fortune flaunting and self-assertive, and Sir Edward wearisomely Byronic. Neither plot nor character, moreover, gives any foundation for the last scene. Charlotte, thanks to whose quiet heroism all the lovers are sorted out, has no lover herself. Exasperated by her well-wishers, she calls them all together, and blandly announces that she has all along been engaged to a man neither they nor we have ever heard of. An unfair trick, especially as Charlotte is a thor- oughly likeable girl, for whom we have all made plans. I personally am convinced that Jane Austen intended her for her host's brother Sidney : " A very clever Young Man—and with great powers of pleasing. He lives too much in the world to be settled ; that is his only fault."
The re-told opening is so unlike Jane Austen's that they can scarcely be compared. Miss Cobbett's involved, over- loaded sentences certainly will not stand comparison, either in description or dialogue. Her Mr. Parker, for instance, is merely earnest about the amenities of Sanditon ; Jane Austen's, inimitably, plunges into airy panegyric which in anyone else would be silenced by the pain of a sprained ankle : " Such a place as Sanditon, Sir, I may say was wanted, was called for. Nature had marked it out—had spoken in most intelligible Characters—The finest, purest, Sea Breeze on the Coast—acknowledged to be so—Excellent bathing—fine hard sand—deep water ten yards from the shore—no mud—no weeds— no shiney rocks—Never was there a place more palpably designed by Nature for the resort of the Invalid—the very Spot which thousands seemed in need of—The most desirable distance from London !"
It is clear that to mention Sanditon was to ask for criticism. Somehow Lengthened, on its own merits, is a pleasant, lively story, well worth reading. If it had no professed original, we should enjoy its humour, improbability, and movement, and remark at intervals that it reminded us of Jane Austen.
MONICAREDLICH.
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