Sanditonian

English

Etymology

From Sanditon +‎ -ian. Not used by Jane Austen herself.

Noun

Sanditonian (plural Sanditonians)

1. (literary criticism) An inhabitant of the fictional town of Sanditon from the unfinished novel Sanditon (1817) by the English writer Jane Austen.
   • 1998, Deidre Shauna Lynch, The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning, Chicago, Ill., London: The University of Chicago Press, →ISBN, part two (Inside Stories), pages 224 (Jane Austen and the Social Machine) and 302–303 (Notes):

     It is fitting that all roads in the town Mr. Parker has “planned and built, and praised and puffed” (328) seem to lead to the circulating library, because Sanditonians like Parker, who has built on sand, seem immensely willing to invest in empty convention—in signs in the place of substance. […] Austen is being somewhat disingenuous here. She herself feels free to put novel slang into the mouth of a Sanditonian like Sir Edward Denham; what Anna has not learned from her aunt’s fictions, perhaps, is that in that context novel slang is always in virtual quotation marks. It is never used, and never to be read, “straight.”

   • 2002, Juliette Shapiro, Excessively Diverted, Virtualbookworm.com Publishing Inc., →ISBN, page 227:

     The party was to consist of Mr and Mrs Parker, Charlotte, Abigail, Diana, Susan and Arthur, Mrs Griffiths, the Miss Beauforts, the three Hollises and several Sanditonians who had been deemed suitable either by the nature of their ailments or the size of their purses.

   • 2010, Arthur M. Axelrad, “Text and Commentary”, in Jane Austen’s Sanditon: A Village by the Sea, AuthorHouse, →ISBN, chapter 3, page 144:

     As in so many other passages in this manuscript, Jane Austen successfully engages the reader through use of an ambiguous narrative voice, starting the chapter in a sententious tone reminiscent of the opening lines of Pride and Prejudice, which are Mrs. Bennet’s mantra. That every neighborhood should have a great lady, if from the author, drips with a sardonic tone. If from Mr. Parker, the inner narrator, it smacks of sycophancy. And if from Lady Denham, who has been reminding Sanditonians for a long time now that she has a special place in the community, it is merely self-serving.

   • 2011, Sara Salih, “Pre-Emancipation Stories of Race: Marly and The Woman of Colour”, in Representing Mixed Race in Jamaica and England from the Abolition Era to the Present (Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures; 30), Routledge, →ISBN, page 71:

     Then there is Miss Lambe, about whom I have written in detail elsewhere: silent, chilly and tender, with the enormous fortune that throws the Sanditonians into such an eager flurry prior to the mysterious woman of colour’s arrival in the seaside town.

   • 2021, Talia Schaffer, “Austen, Dickens, and Brontë: Bodies before the Normate”, in Communities of Care: The Social Ethics of Victorian Fiction, Princeton, N.J., Oxford: Princeton University Press, →ISBN, page 60:

     If we want to understand the Sanditonians’ resistance to medical professionals, we will need to understand what forms of care they endorse instead, and why their specifically convalescent population required a different sort of approach.

Adjective

Sanditonian (comparative more Sanditonian, superlative most Sanditonian)

1. (literary criticism) Of or relating to the fictional town of Sanditon from the unfinished novel Sanditon (1817) by the English writer Jane Austen.
   • 1990, Terry Castle, “Introduction”, in John Davie, editor, Northanger Abbey, Lady Susan, The Watsons, and Sanditon (The World’s Classics), Oxford, Oxon, New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, →ISBN, page xxx:

     Parker himself is a model of bustling absurdity: a lover of healthful living, bathing machines, and the ‘Bracing Sea Air’ of Sanditon, a despiser of old-fashioned houses in ‘little contracted Nooks’, kitchen gardens (‘Who can endure a Cabbage Bed in October?’), and anyone who doubts the fact that Sanditon is ‘the very Spot which Thousands [seem] in need of’. On the rival attractions of Brinshore, a village down the coast, this ‘Enthusiast’ for all things Sanditonian is appropriately withering: ‘Why, in truth Sir, I fancy we may apply to Brinshore, that line of the Poet Cowper in his description of the religious Cottager, as opposed to Voltaire—“She, never heard of half a mile from home”’ (p. 326).

   • 1992, Deidre Shauna Lynch, Face Value: The Economy of Character and the Institution of the Novel, 1750-1820, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University, →OCLC, page 170:

     A late contribution to the cartography of taste that the Austen canon seeks to register, this presentation of the Sanditonian way of seeing sets out terms for the proper appreciation of the Austen heroine. It puts into place the negative pole of the system of reading relations: and so this exposé of Sanditonian perception sets off to advantage the deep reading that an Austen heroine does or learns to do.

   • 2021 summer, Nancy Marck Cantwell, “Fleecing Miss Lambe: Exploitation, Tourism, and the New National Narrative in Sanditon”, in Persuasions On-Line‎^[1], volume 41, number 2, The Jane Austen Society of North America, Inc., →ISSN, archived from the original on 2022-06-30:

     Sheridan confirms the accepted belief that colonial wealth stimulated by English investment should circulate back to benefit England: “If the West India trade was in effect a home trade, it was to be expected that the income from this trade should centre in the mother country” (304). A similar sense of entitlement can be detected in Sanditonian efforts to appropriate Miss Lambe, to provide her with consumer goods and satisfying touristic experiences, and to secure her ongoing patronage of the resort—particularly in order to compete with the French tourist sites that became popular following the Napoleonic Wars and thus keep colonial wealth circulating within the domestic economy.