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It is a truth universally acknowledged that Jane Austen chose to ignore the decisive historical events of her time. Where ... are the Napoleonic wars: the real current of history? But history has many currents, and the social history of the landed families, at that time in England, was among the most important.1 Although it would be difficult to argue that Sanditon (1817) is "historical" in any immediately obvious sense, it is nonetheless clear that the social history of England is central to Jane Austen's last, unfinished text. Critics appear to agree that the novel, which, as Warren Roberts points out, was written during a period of social turbulence in England, reflects anxieties about the shift from one socio-economic structure to another.2 Once a fishing village and agricultural community, Sanditon has been "perverted" into a resort, a "sandy town," where the sea is an exploitable resource and invalidism is a social activity engaged in by characters who are "urban, rootless, irresponsible and self-indulgent." As Tony Tanner puts it, "[Sanditon is] a little parable of change—supersession, supplanting, and substitution."3 These are certainly accurate characterizations, and yet the [End Page 329] majority of the novel's commentators overlook what Edward Said would call its "geographical problematic," the fact that the seaside resort is dependent on economic resources from outside—from other areas of England, and, it seems, from England's Caribbean colonies. I am referring to Miss Lambe, Austen's only "brown" character—so briefly invoked and so tantalizingly incomplete. Certainly, Miss Lambe does not take up much of Sanditon's eleven and a half chapters, and as my title suggests, she never utters a word. All the same, the characters' allusions to the "West India" contingent, along with Miss Lambe's presence in the text, certainly warrant closer critical attention than they have hitherto received. Analyses of Sanditon tend to focus on its local engagements with class, morality, economics, and social change, but as Said points out (twice) in his by-now notorious reading of Mansfield Park, morality in Austen's fictional world is inseparable from its local social basis (this is Raymond Williams's contention). The local social basis is highly dependent on "unnamed outside forces"—specifically, wealth derived from plantations in the Caribbean.4 These forces are quite obvious in Sanditon, where the characters' reactions to the news that "a rich West Indian [family]" is coming to town centre almost uniquely on the perceived economic benefits to the community. In this article, I want to dwell on the valences of the novel's references to "West Indians," along with Austen's brief description of the silent but eloquently suggestive figure of Miss Lambe. Sanditon's geographical and spatial engagements are not invoked with anything like the specificity in Mansfield Park (1814), but it is nonetheless possible to offer contextual readings of the novel that will begin to open the broad expanse of domestic imperialist culture within which it situates itself. Reading Sanditon in the context of widespread contemporary cultural anxieties about "West Indians" (especially "brown" ones) both at home and abroad, as well as fictional expressions of these concerns, will yield a more precise sense of the meaning behind Miss Lambe's appearance in the southern seaside town. I will draw from fictional and non-fictional sources in order to suggest some of the ideological paradigms available to Austen at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Once contextualized, it appears that, even in its unfinished state, [End Page 330] Sanditon departs from sentimentalized representations of "the mulatto" woman by focusing on her economic role in a society where money has superseded morality. Unlike Elaine Jordan (one of the few critics who has tackled the subject of Miss Lambe in any detail), I am not going to place this character alongside what Jordan identifies as a small group of nineteenth-century...
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