The author visited the new resorts of Lyme Regis and Sidmouth, and is rumoured to have had a holiday romance. Did she also create a new genre with Sanditon, her strange final work? S anditon , abandoned unfinished in March 1817, four months before Jane Austen died, is set in a fictional fishing village on the Sussex coast. Here the property speculators Mr Parker and Lady Denham plan an ambitious modern development to rival its longer established neighbours at Brighton, Eastbourne and Worthing. This was not the first time Austen had imagined characters by the sea. Persuasion , finished only months before Sanditon was begun, is set in part in Lyme Regis on the Dorset coast. And in her fourth novel, Emma , fretful Mr Woodhouse disputes with his elder daughter Isabella the pros and cons of two resorts for health and sea bathing – South End, on the Thames estuary, and Cromer, in Norfolk – their conversation only serving to make Emma, who has never seen the sea, “envious and miserable”. In the same novel, the