Jane Extended

THE WATSONS (318 pp.)--Jane Austen (and John Coates)--Crowell ($4).

"The true lovers of Jane Austen are those who do not advertise their devotion, but are content to whisper 'Dear Jane' as they pause at the grave in the ancient aisle of Winchester Cathedral." This remark (from the Concise Cambridge History of English Literature) shows precisely the position Jane Austen holds in English literature, for would anyone whisper "Dear Alfred" at Tennyson's grave or "Dear Charles" at Dickens'--still less be urged to do so by an academic history? The fact is that though no two "Janeites" can ever agree on what words to use in venerating the author of Pride and Prejudice, Emma and Mansfield Park, none doubt that worship is indicated. Even rugged Rudyard Kipling imagined her being greeted in paradise by Fielding, Smollett, Cervantes and Shakespeare.

This vision is clearly shared by British Novelist John (The Widow's Tale, Time for Tea) Coates, who has abandoned his own work to bring to light an old, unfinished manuscript of Dear Jane's.

Bone-Dry Wit. Born in a Hampshire parsonage in 1775, Jane Austen grew up in the world of the French and American Revolutions, and showed no trace of interest in either. The world of her six novels is simply and finally that of genteel young women gunning for husbands (she herself died a spinster at 41). Included inevitably in this world are harassed fathers and embattled moms, superfluous daughters and choosy suitors, haughty heiresses and dashing cads, all playing their parts in an endless round of dances, tea parties and chaperoned strolls, and doing their best never to cut a competitive throat without first casting a veil of perfect gentility over the operation.

The art of it all lies in the bone-dry wit and intelligence with which Novelist Austen ordered and fixed this stately marital bear garden; no novelist, before or since, ever trod more precisely the thin borderlines that divide the heart from the purse, the ambitions from the conventions, the rigid rules of the game from the fibbing, cheating gambits of the desperate players. The game is tough often to the point of grimness, but it is always comedy, never tragedy. "Let other pens," wrote plain Jane coolly, "dwell on guilt and misery."

Timely Blushes. Devoted Janeites cherish even the unfinished fragments of Jane Austen's novels. Chief of these is The Watsons--six chapters of a novel that she began around 1803 and then (for no known reason) abandoned. Published for the first time in 1871, The Watsons was twice snatched up in the 19205 by authors (one of them Jane Austen's great-grandniece) who tried to complete it in a faithfully Janeish style. Now Novelist Coates has taken another stab at the job. What Coates had to start with was a typically Austenish setup: a poor widower with four unmarried daughters; sundry eligible young men ranging from a peer to a parson; a slew of poor relations, aunts, uncles. Coates tries manfully to convey at least half a dozen of them to the altar with Miss Austen's austere femininity.

The joke on Coates is that he knows his Austen far too well. He keeps trying to steer the characters in The Watsons in "original" directions, for fear they will grow too like the characters in other Austen novels--until honest imitation melts into irresistible parody. It all goes to show the difficulties confronting an author who has been raised in the world of Thurber, Waugh and Ivy Compton-Burnett and must yet deal deadpan with ploys (such as swoons and blushes) of which he has had no experience.

Still, Coates's Watsons has two virtues. One is purely malicious: bits of it can be read aloud to fanatical Janeites to see if they can guess the true author. The other virtue is that Author Coates has managed to recapture much of the attitude to love and life that Jane Austen once expressed in a single short query: "For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?"

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