Charlotte Heywood is privileged to accompany Mr and Mrs Parker to their home in Sanditon &mdash not least because, they assure her, it is soon to become the fashionable epicentre of society summers. Finding the town all but deserted, she is party to the machinations of her socially mobile hosts in their attempts to gather a respectable crowd. As Sanditon fills with visitors, Austen assembles a classic cast of characters possessing varying degrees of absurdity and sense.

The last of Austen&rsquos fictional works, written in the year before her death when she was gravely ill, Sanditon affords a glimpse of the ultimate creative powers and preoccupations of one of the greatest figures in English literature.