Playin' Jane

By Christopher Porterfield

SANDITON by JANE AUSTEN

and ANOTHER LADY 329 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $8.95.

In 1817, only a few months before she died of Addison's disease at the age of 42, Jane Austen managed to start a new novel but had to break off after 26,000 words. The result was a fragment that would tantalize posterity. Though it jangled with a bumptious satire reminiscent of Austen's youthful burlesques, it seemed to project something both ambitious and new. When it was finally published in 1925 under the title Sanditon--named for the seaside resort town of its setting--E.M. Forster saluted the prescient way the book portrayed nature as "a geographic and economic force." Virginia Woolf said that if completed, Sanditon would have shown Austen to be a forerunner of Henry James and Proust.

But questions remained: Which of the half-dozen plots set spinning in the work's opening chapters would Austen have developed? How would the forerunner of James and Proust have finished the novel?

This new version of Sanditon offers one solution. The original fragment has been completed by "Another Lady,"* her anonymity coyly echoing the signature ("by a lady") on Austen's first novel, Sense and Sensibility. Austen, this Other Lady suggests, might have chosen to follow Charlotte Heywood, a shrewd country girl on a visit to Sanditon. Charlotte falls in love with a fellow from London named Sidney Parker and, after a minuet of polite rivalries, surreptitious coach journeys and misdirected letters, happily snares and is snared by him. In other words, most of the complexity, satire and social implications suggested by the Sanditon fragment (which ends on page 77 of this volume) might have melted away, leaving little more than an at tractive historical romance.

Well, maybe. On the other hand, maybe Austen has once again fallen victim to her own cult, the Janeites. The Janeites take their author like warm milk at bedtime, cozily oblivious to the ground glass of her ironies and tough-mindedness. Perhaps only a Janeite would be capable of completing Sanditon--and this version is certainly a skillful pastiche--but at the same time, perhaps only a Janeite could so invert its value. In an afterword, the Other Lady praises Austen for the elegant escapism she provides from "the shoddy values and cheap garishness of our own age."

Yet surely the Austen of Emma and Persuasion provides very little escapism from anything--including the shoddy values and cheap garishness of her own age as well as ours. Non-Janeites who agree may find the new Sanditon watery milk indeed. qedChristopher Porterfield

*She is, in fact, Mrs. Marie Dobbs, an Australian-born journalist who has published a handful of novels under the name Anne Telscombe. Only one has come out in the U.S.: The Listener (1969).

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