ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Jane Austen's final texts: 'Sanditon', abandoned in March 1817, and 'When Winchester races first took their beginning', a poem written a few days before her death. 'Sanditon' has long been seen as radically different in terms of landscape. Austen's, writing with the consciousness of time running out, perhaps is more overt in her critique, but she treats the agency of animals and nature throughout her oeuvre. Further, the oppression of nature and animals is implicitly critiqued by its connection to the heroines, who are rational, feeling beings but are treated as objects by patriarchal society. Austen recognized that to write the human is also to write the animal, and that 'the discourse of speciesism can be used to mark any social other'. Austen also drew attention to food's demarcation of a gendered hierarchy. In Austen's novels, unequal power relations are manifest not only in the distribution and consumption but also in the production of food.
