"Sickness is a Dangerous Indulgence": Disease and Disability in Jane Austen's Persuasion and Sanditon

Starting from biographical evidence about the role of disability within the Austen family, this article investigates how Jane Austen’s narrative is pervaded by an ongoing tension between the healthy and active body and the ill and sick one. Specifically, it studies how this tension reaches its climax in her last works, Persuasion (1818) and Sanditon (1817, published in 1925), and results in a polemical rejection of hypochondria. In these two novels, Austen is extremely critical of imaginary patients who use their illness or disability as a justification for their own indolence, while also exalting the authentically sick and fragile who face their illness with pride and dignity. This attitude is particularly explicit in Sanditon, the highly satirical unfinished novel written during the last months of her life, in which satire and irony seem to function as a reaction against the illness that is killing the author, an extreme attempt to ridicule her fatal disease and affirm her agency against it. The binary opposition between the “selfindulgent” and the “genteel” invalid seems to exclude the representation of those who, like Austen’s own brother George, are affected by a condition that makes them dependent upon the care of others.