Jane Austen

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Oysterback, Maryland.--Chelsea Redmond is 13 and in eighth grade this year. Every night after dinner she bikes down to the harbor and baits up her father's trot lines. For this, Junior pays her, and she's saving up the money.Chelsea is the frugal one of the Redmond kids; she lends her brother Jason money at usurious rates of interest. Jason used to bait the lines, but now that he can drive, he's got a part-time job over to the Burger Clown in town. The one thing Jason knows is that he doesn't want to be a waterman like his father.

In the autumn of 1791, a very precocious Jane Austen amused herself and her family by creating lively and allusive parodies of the literary and stylistic conventions of contemporary writing. Using fiction, Shakespeare's tragedies, Sheridan's comedies, historical romances and her family's comments as the supporting "evidence" for her outrageous assertions, she re-visioned history as a catalog of crimes against her favorite heroines: Anna Bullen, Lady Jane Grey and Mary, Queen of Scots.The irreverent, hilarious "History" was obviously intended for pure amusement.

Title: "Presumption"Author: Julia BarrettPublisher: M. Evans & Co.Length, price: 238 pages, $30Title: "Pemberley"Author: Emma TennantPublisher: St. Martin's PressLength, price: 184 pages, $18.95 "I am a Jane Austenite," E. M. Forster wrote in 1924, "and therefore slightly imbecile about Jane Austen. . . . I read and re-read, the mouth open and the mind closed. Shut up in measureless content, I greet her by the name of most kind hostess, while criticism slumbers."Whether or not the 2,700 members of the Jane Austen Society of North America are amused by Forster's idolatry, they cannot ignore two recent incursions onto sacred ground: Julia Barrett and Emma Tennant have both had the temerity to continue where "Pride and Prejudice" left off.By calling "Presumption" an "entertainment," Julia Braun Kessler and Gabrielle Donnelly (writing under the pseudonym Julia Barrett)

WHAT JANE AUSTEN ATEAND DICKENS KNEW: FROMFOX HUNTING TO WHIST --THE FACTS OF DAILY LIFE INNINETEENTH-CENTURYENGLANDDaniel PoolSimon & Schuster416 pages. $25To truly understand the 19th-century English novel, you don't need semiotics, deconstructionism or even any critical approach. What you need is a working knowledge of pounds and pence, the class system, dowries, primogeniture, church politics, weddings and wills. If this sounds like a Lewis Caroll nonsense list, it should. The 19th-century novel, more than any other genre in any other period, is an omnium gatherum of life as it was lived by its readers.

THE OLD CONTEMPTIBLES.Martha Grimes.Little, Brown.333 pages. $19.95.Perhaps it's time to retire "whodunit." In many of the bescontemporary examples of the "cozy" mystery genre grandmothered by Agatha Christie, who did the deed is almost incidental to the unpleasant (if thoroughly delightful) unraveling of the characters' destinies. For much of "The Old Contemptibles," there is some question as to whether anything was, in fact, "dun."In Martha Grimes' newest -- named, like her 10 previous novels, for an inn that features in the plot -- her police superintendent hero Richard Jury becomes involved with an enigmatic, troubled woman whose family suffers a series of ambiguous tragedies, including two suicides and two fatal accidents.