Byline: PETER LEWIS

WITH the release of the much-lauded film Sense And Sensibility, we are in the grip of another bout of Jane Austen fever.

It is our second attack in 12 months. Last year, Persuasion and then Pride And Prejudice showed that Austen addiction could hook 11 million viewers.

What is it about us that craves the deceptively gentle vision of a Hampshire country clergyman’s daughter who began writing about love 200 years ago? A woman who not merely never married but, so far as the evidence goes, never had a full-blown love affair, let alone went to bed with a man. What is it that Austen knew that we are missing?

By present standards, her spinsterly life was absurdly circumscribed.

Her schooling ceased at 11, and other than visits to Bath, London, Lyme and the odd country house, she seldom travelled beyond Hampshire. She had no money of her own and was constantly hard put to dress respectably.

As a family-loving home bird, little happened to her. But with an eye and an ear like hers, what did that matter? `Three or four families in a country village,’ she once reflected, `is the very thing to work on.’

The one thing that has not changed since Austen wrote about it so brilliantly is people’s anxiety over love, money and social standing.

How much more elegant and sexually attractive, if inconvenient, than our own were the Regency styles for both women and men. We also miss out on ceremony, the bowing and curtsying on social occasions, the coaches and the balls, the chandeliers and the bewigged footmen, the panoply of what we call heritage but was then the daily, natural style.

But what we are really missing, which the elegance expressed, is restraint, the quality we have thrown to the winds. How long is it since couples aroused one another’s interest, as in Sense And Sensibility, by reading poetry aloud or singing ballads at the pianoforte? Today, they are more likely to be dumbly watching people blowing each other to pieces in a Hollywood action movie.

`Sexually explicit’ is the warning (or inducement) attached to books, films and late-night television. This is the explicit era, when magazine covers proclaim their orgasmic contents and when nudity, crudity and almost obligatory intercourse are depicted in most novels and dramas. They are backed up by television girlie discussion shows, sex guides, quizzes and cataracts of four-letter words spouted in the interests of realism or so-called stand-up comedy. Pride And Prejudice and Sense And Sensibility offer us a crudity-free zone, cleansed of four-letter words, the exposure of what were once called private parts and sexual grappling. Is this a handicap? By no means.

The thrills which they offer are superior. Mr Darcy invaded the dreams of millions of female viewers by merely glowering with unspoken desire.

Elizabeth Bennet enslaved shoals of men with the sweetness of her smile combined with the sharpness of her tongue. The Dashwood sisters - one all sense, one all sensibility - succumb to the reticence, shyness and manly self-control of their respective beaux.

Explicitness be blowed, it is implicitness that does the trick, that turns people on today as yesterday: the unmentioned brush of hand against hand in the quadrille; the lifting up of a girl with a twisted ankle in a rain-drenched park. The grunting hurly-burly of bare thighs and rumpled sheets soon grows tedious in comparison.

Austen knew well that silly young women in her day were all too easily ruined, as Lydia Bennet nearly was by running away with Wickham. But today, Lydia and Wickham might have been dispatched on a Blind Date with many an encouraging nudge and wink from Cilla Black. What would Miss Austen make of such an attitude? Though no prude, she could hardly accept that trial weekends are just a jolly charade for a voyeuristic audience.

She would recognise immediately the entanglement of Bianca and Ricky in EastEnders. What would appal her would be the poverty of their powers of self-expression, when `two-faced cow’ is considered the height of invective and `I wouldn’t want you if you was the last man on earth’ is the summit of rejection.

When Lizzy expressed the same sentiments to Darcy, she put it rather better: `From the first moment of my acquaintance with you, your manners impressed me with your arrogance, your conceit and your selfish disdain of the feelings of others . . . and I had not known you a month before I felt you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed upon to marry.’

Why can’t EastEnders, Brooksiders, Coronation Streeters or the characters of police and hospital serials command their native language to better effect? Because, their scriptwriters would argue, they are meant to be true to life. But need this be the dismal standard of social intercourse or are we taking verbal cues from sloppy television dialogue?

It was not so in the 19th century. Twenty years after Austen’s death, Charles Dickens brought the lower orders on the scene in a rich and individual variety of speech.

Sam Weller, a mere boots in a coaching inn when we meet him in Pickwick Papers, is verbally ready for anyone. Asked if he’s a bit of a wag, he replies: `My eldest brother was troubled with that complaint. It may be catching - I used to sleep with him.’ Austen’s pages abound with sharply observed women who are silly, devious, bitchy, greedy, dissembling, toadying, weak-willed - or iron-willed and fortune-hunting. She saw through them as only a woman could. But she appreciated what they were struggling with - the restrictions imposed on them by men.

If you did not inherit money, you needed to marry it and to do that a girl needed looks. Austen was born without either, although the only drawing we have of her by her sister can hardly do her justice.

All we know of her love life is that having accepted the proposal from a rich young heir, she changed her mind overnight and fled. She made it plain that there were limits to the price you should pay for financial security.

`Anything is to be preferred or endured rather than marrying without affection,’ she warned her favourite niece.

She earned herself a modest independence with her pen, but shunned the celebrity that it might have brought her. Like all her books, Sense And Sensibility was published anonymously - `By A Lady’. Even her tombstone does not mention that she was a writer.

Austen did not want to be famous, even for 15 minutes. Ladies in her time preferred to be modest. They lacked such role models as Miss Joan Collins, Miss Ruby Wax, Madonna or the Duchess of York, who have given feminine go-getting an air of such seductive charm.

In Austen’s time, the only respectable career open to women was matrimony. But for all the limitations of her society, she certainly believed it was possible for women to be happy.

Could we not combine some of her society’s virtues with those of our own?

Could not restraint once again be the standard of behaviour and of public entertainment?

Could not our use of language be as ambitious as hers? Could not TV and film scriptwriters take a leaf from her book, swear off swearing, shun cliched incoherence and attempt articulacy?

Then perhaps we might all start imitating the example of Jane Austen - begging her pardon, of `A Lady’.

Is there a place for Jane Austen’s modesty and manners in a modern world *

AVRIL BRISCOE, 58, a retired doctor from Norwich: `We couldn’t possibly go back to long, ritualised courtships, though there is some merit in the idea of having your husband selected for you: marrying someone from a similar background is more important than we like to admit. It still matters what your mother thinks of your boyfriend. Her attitude affects the kind of relationships you form in adult life.’

* JILL COOPER, 47, a teacher from Dorset: `Although women’s circumstances have changed, emotions remain the same. People still marry for the wrong reasons, for money rather than love, even though today they might not have to. Austen’s portrayal of the niceties of life may seem escapist, but her observations on life and love are funny, accessible and true.’

* KATE GROOMBRIDGE, 20, student, Norwich: `It’s every girl’s dream of being swept away by a knight on a white horse, but I wouldn’t want it to happen in real life.Having to get my mother’s approval every time I wanted to meet a man wouldn’t be a problem for me, but some of my friends wouldn’t let their mothers choose their socks, let alone their boyfriends.’

* NEIL FAILES, 32, a social worker from Dorset: `What appealed to me was the romance; the timeless story of love repressed, then expressed in the end. In spite of today’s flaunting of sexuality, we still respond to the romanticism of an age when feelings were conveyed only through looks. The feelings Austen describes are as relevant today as they were then. People still find it difficult to put their emotions into words; they still marry for the wrong reaons.’

* STEVE COOPER, 45, a teacher from Dorset: `I don’t believe the reasons people marry have changed - romanticism still exists, people fall madly in love in the same way and some still marry for money or status. I thought it was a very sexy film, although nothing explicit was shown. But although manners and loyalty are admirable qualities, the film also hints at the misery which bubbled beneath the civilised veneer.’

* MARTIN THIRKETTLE, 40, a town planner from Norwich: `All those elaborate, long drawn-out courtship rituals weren’t any more romantic than what happens today. In fact, I think rituals take the romance out of love. You’d never get the chance to relax and get to know each other. All the formality probably protected cads and allowed them to get away with bad behaviour.

Nowadays, you’re expected to be honest about your feelings in a relationship and you can’t hide behind courtesies.’

“Good Sense in the Old Virtues; What can we learn from Jane Austen’s picture of courtly love?. he Daily Mail. February 26, 1996. COPYRIGHT 1996