Regular blog readers know that I’m squeeing with excitement over the upcoming film adaptation of Sanditon, the novel Jane Austen left unfinished at her death. Though I've duly noted the casting announcements -- Charlotte Rampling as Lady Denham, Holliday Grainger as Charlotte Heywood, Max Irons as Sidney Parker -- somehow I’d missed until recently this link to the website of production company Fluidity Films, which answers a key question about the shape of the project: how the screenplay will finish Jane Austen's truncated story.
The site makes explicitly clear that the filmmakers plan to follow the plot of the best-known and most widely admired Sanditon completion, the 1975 version by Australian novelist and journalist Marie Dobbs (1924-2015). (Spoiler alert: the plot synopsis summarizes the whole plot, so don’t read more than halfway if you’d rather not know how it all ends.)
As I noted when I reviewed Dobbs’ book for my Sanditon Summer blog series, her version is workmanlike and enjoyable, although it lacks Austen’s biting wit. In the right hands, however, it should make a delightful film. My squeeing continues unabated.
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