Corbitt Nesta

Corbitt Nesta's short stories have appeared on Eclectica.com, East of the Web.com, Dead Mule.com and From the Asylum.com,and in Lunch Hour Stories, her articles on Italy in Transitions Abroad, and on Suite101.com.

brooch    castle ghost story    castles fiction    castles in italy    domestic help    ghosts    ghosts and romance    ghosts and witches    ghosts in love    ghosts of the past    italian    italian family    italian fascism    italian food    italian jews    italian men    italian restaurant    italy    jewelry    jewelry box    jewelry theft    maid    restaurant    restaurant chef    sociopath    sociopathic personality    vintage jewelry   

• A Return to Sanditon on March 07, 2011
  
  Sanditon was Jane Austen's last novel, and in fact was never completed. Begun just a few months before her death, the novel stops after only a few short chapters. Almost two hundred years later, Anne Toledo has undertaken completing the novel in the inimitable Austen style. Toledo is not the first to take Austen's setting, her characters and plot and continue them to the logical Austen conclusion. Her `completion' is however the best of the several published in the last 50 years. Toledo has done a magnificent job. After the first few lines of the `new' chapters, the reader feels she is in good hands, the hands of a master novelist, as if she were truly reading the last of Jane Austen's novels. The style, the almost mathematically balanced quality of the sentence construction, the cadence of the dialogue, the character development, the setting and the ins and outs of the plot ARE Jane Austen. The setting, as in Austen's later novels, is all important. Sanditon is an English sea resort in the planning and early construction stage. The characters are all in one way or another concerned with making the place successful. Interwoven with this commercial interest, very well researched and seamlessly presented, are the love stories, family conflicts and descriptions of the changing social fabric in England in the early 19th century. Toledo's novel, exactly like all of Jane Austen's complete ones, can be read on many levels. And it's a fascinating read. We recommend it to all Jane Austen fans.