But even as she completed this tender and elegiac work, another side of her was preparing, in the unfinished ''Sanditon,'' a merciless satire on crazed romantic sensibilities, in a idiom reminiscent of the uproarious burlesques she wrote in her youth. Nokes's biography does not, except in passing, critically discuss Austen's writings. But it offers an attractive evocation of her early sketches, often unfinished. They are marvels of surreal brilliance and zany inconsequence. Whole traditions of writerly absurdity are punctured in one sentence.
People fall in love at first sight, or even just before, with a dizzying automatism.
Their timings are those of stage farce. They faint and revive, as heroines should, but with an instantaneity few humans, or even heroines, have ever achieved. Nokes might have said more about these, but he brings out well, in this pleasant biography, the atmosphere of family entertainments and theatricals that created them. Claude Rawson is the Maynard Mack Professor of English at Yale.