The Lonely Shore is a hardback with black and white illustrations, and has 136 pages.
Jane Austen's final and uncompleted novel, Sanditon (recently televised), poses an intriguing question:
Why would a dying woman choose to write about a seaside resort for hypochondriacs?
This book attempts to answer that question, bringing to life Jane's doomed holiday romance at Sidmouth when she was twenty-five and her subsequent holidays with her parents at Lyme. It suggests the motivation behind her invention of a seaside place of her own in Sanditon, while landlocked at Chawton Cottage in Hampshire during her final illness.
The book examines the growth during Jane Austen's lifetime of the seaside resort; with the twin benefits of health and society. A fictional chapter recreates Jane's experience of sea-bathing; as described in a letter of November 1804 to her sister Cassandra from Lyme and describes the varied entertainments available on a seaside holiday in the Regency period.
