Jane Austen: Obstinate Heart

In her teens and 20s, Austen was nearly as witty, pretty and delightful as her heroine Elizabeth Bennet (Pride and Prejudice) and, at later times, as mousy and mean-spirited as Fanny Price (Mansfield Park). Though she was, for her place in the English world, very poor and socially vulnerable, her ""obstinate heart"" prevented her from accepting any of the many proposals she received from men she did not love. Myer sensibly takes for granted her reader's admiration of Austen's novels, and seems to see her duty as clearing up little prejudices and likely misunderstandings about Austen's life and times. And about those times, Myer, a novelist herself, is fine, relating and explaining the mores and manners of Georgian and Regency England: ""Her generation popularized the concept of sightseeing and holidays away from home, reviving the habit of traveling for pleasure which had declined after the Reformation when religious pilgrimages were outlawed."" This is serviceable and learned without seeming academic. But if a reader wants to know Austen without a middle-woman's interpretation, any edition of her letters is more immediately and completely revealing. Austen's personality, lightly sketched in this book, is bold and vivid in the letters, which Myer paraphrases or too grudgingly excerpts. The biography's finest passage, affectingly narrated, describes Austen's death, which came at 41 amid her recent fame but before the publication of Northanger Abbey and that of her beautiful and marvelous Persuasion. Illustrations not seen by PW. (Apr.)