SEARCHING FOR JANE AUSTEN

Many of Austen's detractors, and even quite a few of her fans, regard "Jane" as a dull homebody who wrote light, fluffy books for girls. "This attitude must end," Auerbach fumes as she tries to "strip off [the] ruffles and ringlets" that have shaped the author's public image. The Austen sketched here is an ambitious novelist, confident in her superior talent, with a subversive and biting sense of humor. Close readings of the novels, as well as the often ignored "juvenilia," reveal a rich literary sensibility dense with allusion—if you haven't read Austen already, the microscopic attention to detail here will make you pick up her books. Auerbach's scholarly background in 19th-century literature (she's a professor of English at University of Wisconsin–Madison) serves her well in this analysis, but her revisionist approach is most engaging when it wrestles with her subject's public image. She demonstrates how Austen's own family whitewashed that image by suppressing much of her correspondence, and riffs through an assortment of modern portrayals that bear little resemblance to the woman Auerbach uncovers. Like Austen's, Auerbach's humor can be sly. Subtly questioning Mark Twain's professed hatred of Austen, she imagines the pair as Bogart and Hepburn in The African Queen . Readers who enjoyed the novel The Jane Austen Book Club will find similar pleasures here, though the high price may prove an obstacle. B&w illus. (Nov.)