Sanditon without a Summer

Abstract

To be familiar with Jane Austen’s reception history is to also be familiar with her work being frequently characterised as preoccupied with the minor and the inconsequential. This article asks how we might read Austen’s concern with the microhistorical alongside the Anthropocene. Focusing on Sanditon, a fragment with a close relationship to temporal discontinuity, this article responds to the macro/micro bifurcation of Anthropocene time by examining Sanditon, first, in relation to the volcanically induced climate change that occurred in its immediate context, and second, in the dark light of the Anthropocene. To read Sanditon as an ‘Austenocene’ text, hurtling towards catastrophe, reflects, like a carnival mirror, Austen’s own retrospective anticipation of 1816’s climatological disaster. Sanditon, ending when it is still beginning, invites anticipatory and exploratory readings. It is a fragment and a farce that yokes economic and geopolitical history with climatological history. It is a novel of ‘eighteen-hundred and froze to death’ and of the Anthropocene.