ABSTRACT
In this essay, Sarah Marsh shows how in Sanditon’s biting satire, the collapse of the country-house system produces not the endogamous inland retrenchments of Mansfield Park nor Persuasion’s exogamous removal of domestic virtue to seagoing navy families—but rather an unsociable society on England’s coastline overrun by people for whom Britain is not real property, but a last resort. Hypochondria is the figure Austen adopts to describe this national collapse. Once figured satirically in peripheral characters like Mrs Bennet and Mr Woodhouse, the Sanditon hypochondriacs overrun the manuscript with speech patterns that defer to no one, suggesting a nation of Britons attending only to themselves and away from the organising principles of inland country life: primogeniture, strict settlement, and highly coded systems of social deference and paternalism.
