Amazing Grace : GRACE HAD AN ENGLISH HEART <i> by Jessica Mitford (E.P. Dutton: $18.95; 159 pp.) </i>

Invited to contribute a biography to a series called “Lives of Modern Women,” Jessica Mitford bypassed Eleanor Roosevelt and Jacqueline Onassis in favor of Grace Darling, a suggestion that left her prospective publishers somewhat bemused. Grace Darling, Mitford explained, was the 22-year-old daughter of an English lighthouse keeper. In 1838, she persuaded her father to row out to sea to rescue nine survivors of a ship wrecked on an offshore rock, thereby becoming the heroine of three full-scale biographies, at least 20 unclassified literary efforts, one play, hundreds of newspaper reports, and scores of stories in magazines intended for the edification of Victorian girls.

Dark hair streaming behind her, slender arms pulling at the oars against a background of towering waves and menacing cliffs, the likeness of Grace Darling was transferred to countless bits of commemorative china; her brave deed celebrated by innumerable poets up to and including Wordsworth and Swinburne. At least one itinerant entertainer made his living acting out the tale of Grace Darling in pubs. There is a two-room Grace Darling museum in Bamburgh, Northumberland, containing the actual coble rowed by the heroine; a selection of the literature, locks of her hair, shreds of the dress she wore while performing The Deed, as well as miscellaneous items from the Darling household. Mitford, who remembers merry evenings around the family piano singing the Grace Darling Song, was totally captivated.

Tellable in 100 words, the Grace Darling story becomes the nucleus of a tart and witty commentary on Victorian manners and mores; an account of how the nascent English newspapers handled the event, and a detailed examination of the arduous lives of the hack reporters known as “penny-a-liners.” Mitford provides a succinct rundown of the various biographies showing how popular perceptions of Grace Darling changed from ecstatic admiration to jaded revisionism. There’s a mini-anthology of the Grace Darling canon, which ranges from sanctimonious through several grades of atrocious to absolutely hilarious (Wordsworth parodying himself, Swinburne exceeding him); all held precariously together by Mitford’s sprightly chronicle of her own adventures in researching the project.

As a gift to her adopted country, Mitford has also included a chapter titled “An American Interlude,” which recounts the saga of one Idawalley Zorada Lewis of Newport, Rhode Island; the heroine of Lime Rock. After her lighthouse keeper father suffered a stroke, Idawalley Lewis replicated Grace Darling’s feat, not once, but at least 18 times, beginning her heroic exploits at the age of 16 and not retiring until she was 64. Unlike Grace Darling, Miss Lewis is virtually unsung in her native land, possibly because “Idawalley Zorada Lewis had an American heart doesn’t trip off the tongue as readily as ‘Grace had an English heart.’ ”

After enduring the few rewards and many trials of celebrity, Grace Darling died at 26 of influenza, a virtuous spinster who rejected the many suitors who presented themselves in favor of continuing her humble life as the lighthouse keeper’s dutiful daughter. Bemedaled and made a ward of the Duke and Duchess of Northumberland, Grace Darling was showered with gifts, hounded by painters and sculptors, and so inundated with requests for locks of her hair that her brother finally made an arrangement with a village barber for his sweepings, fearing that his amenable sister might go bald satisfying the souvenir hunters. Mitford calls her the first media heroine, though “medium” heroine might be more accurate, since there was really only one at the time, unless you count transfer printing on teacups.

Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of this potpourri is the description of the way the newspapermen of the day worked. With the exception of Parliamentary proceedings, general news was customarily gathered by the penny-a-liners, who would rush frantically from one disaster to another. Once home, they would embroider their sketchy notes to the utmost, using a sharp ivory stylus on onionskin backed with lampblack to produce carbon copies. That done, they would drop off their manuscripts in the night depositories of the papers, hoping to see their work in the morning editions. Mitford tells of one outstandingly successful chap who took lodgings over a firehouse in order to be first on the scene.

Eventually, the winding trail leads back to Grace Darling, and that wonderful chorus:

Go, tell the wide world over

What English pluck can do;

And sing of brave Grace Darling,

Who nobly saved the crew.