A charmingly illustrated explanation of the Regency etiquette
rules followed by the novelist’s characters Jane Austen’s Guide
to Good Manners: Compliments, Charades & Horrible Blunders. By
Josephine Ross. Illustrated by Henrietta Webb. Boomsbury, 133
pp., $14.95. A while back, I wrote a novel about a bride-to-be
who believed that Jane Austen could have solved all her romantic
problems. One reason for her view, I hoped, was clear: Austen’s
novels are full of rules for social conduct. The catch – for my
heroine as for others – is that Austen’s characters typically
follow rules that are implicit, not explicit. And because Austen
was a satirist, her precepts can’t always be taken at face value
even when they are spelled out. Perhaps the best case in point
is the much-misunderstood first line of Pride and Prejudice,
which is often taken literally though meant ironically: “It is a
truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession
of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” Josephine Ross
has decode