All Jane Austen fans will be eagerly looking forward to next Sunday when, in the UK anyway, a dramatisation of Sanditor is scheduled. Any fragment by Jane that can be used in this way is seized upon with joy and I am very much looking forward to seeing what is going to be done with it.
Sanditon was left in manuscript at Jane Austen's death in July 1817 which ended at Chapter 12. So there is not much to deal with as with The Watsons (another fragment which will I am sure end up being dramatised at some stage).
In Sanditon, which was untitled when Jane died, she moves away from her usual setting of families in the countryside and writes, what Kathryn Sutherland in the OUP edition, calls "the first seaside novel". In Emma we 
know that she longs to visit the seaside but has yet to do so, in Persuasion we have the famous fall by Louisa Musgrove at Lyme Regis.and in Mansfield Park there is an episode where Fanny visits her family in Portsmouth. Jane visited the seaside and there have been theories that Sanditon is Sidmouth in Devon but she is very vague aboaut the topography so hard to prove one way or the other.
OUP Classics have produced a new edition of Sanditon edited by Kathryn Sutherland who I have already mentioned. She is a professor of English literature and Senior Research Fellow at St Anne's Oxford, and here she has written an extremely interesting introduction to the text.
Another edition, recently published, is issued by Fentum Press in a rather delightful hard back edition and has an introductory essay by Janet Todd. Janet is the General Editor of the Cambridge Works of Jane Austen and also edits the Cambridge Companion to Pride and Prejudice. Another fascinating essay on the novel with beautiful colour illustrations throughout.
here is a list of continuations at the end of the book and some of these I know, some I do not. It seems a two hour film using Marie Dobbs completion was proposed but nothing has been heard since. 
And it is to Marie Dobbs that I now turn. I have a copy of her continuation which was published in 1975 and it has been on my book shelves for years. I worked at Camden Libraries during this period and was sorting through a pile of books which had been withdrawn and were going to be pulped. When I spotted Sanditon I knew I could not allow it go and came home with it. I rather enjoyed this version. Janet Todd says "it resembles Georgette Heyer's sort of romantic comedy (which is a good thing as far as I am concerned!) and drops the broad satire on medicine and invalid tourism of the Austen original".
I also have to mention Set in the Silver Sea by Jane Austen and A Gentleman which I discovered by chance about a year ago. The author is one David Williams and seems to be self published. I have a copy awaiting my attention and the only reason I have yet to read it is that is enormous. Not a small paperback but the size of a coffee table book so not easy to hold and read.
The dramatisation coming up has been scripted by Andrew Davies who is famous for "sexing up" the classics as he puts it. While I am not decrying his use of the dive in the lake by Darcy in P & P, it can get a bit tiresome after a while as he does rather labour the point. About eighteen months ago Davies produced a dramatisation of War and Peace which was beautiful to look at, but oh so slow and dreary. He managed to introdue incest into it because he said that Tolstoy had hinted at it. Well, I was not about to re-read War and Peace to find out but it seemed to me to be stretching it a bit.
As Sanditon is set by the sea I am sure there will be plenty of Andrew Davies frolics on the shore and nude bathing, but no matter what I am looking forward to this immensely.
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