Lead Soprano in a Victorian Quartet : CITY OF CHILDHOOD <i> By Valerie Townsend Bayer</i> , <i> (St. Martin’s Press: $19.95; 308 pp.) </i>

This book is the first of four ambitiously projected novels to be published under the general title of “Marlborough Gardens.” Valerie Townsend Bayer uses personal journals and letters, as well as public documents, to flesh out the incomplete manuscript of a fictional Victorian novelist, Emma Forster (1825-1914). It should prove a delight to any reader who takes pleasure in seeing through the simple upper surface of events, picking up clues and contradictions from the supplementary files and appendices, to search out the deeper, and often darker, truths of the action.

During her lifetime Emma wrote six novels, but only the first, “Happy Endings,” saw print. She dashed it off in less than six weeks when she was 17 and in love and believing she was loved in return. After her second book, “Misperceptions,” was rejected by her publisher, she continued to write but made no effort to publish, saying at some point, “I was emotionally and intellectually before my time.” Her last completed novel, “Preliminary Communications,” was written after she had read Breuer and Freud on hysteria, and took the form of a satiric reworking of “Jane Eyre.” Her consuming theme had become “the problem of female creativity in a world women had no part in creating.”

“City of Childhood” is Emma’s own title for an unfinished account of the 10th year of her life, from April 1836 to August 1837, written, as we learn in a footnote, “sometimes . . . in first person, and sometimes in third.” Presumably it was meant to reveal, when completed, the origins of Emma’s view of her world, misunderstood at first, but with its true meaning finally exposed.

Our own principal narrator is Harriet Van Buren, a woman of means who has bought an overgrown, half-ruined estate in suburban London. She tells us that “I am an American, born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1898. Rachel Lowe, my companion, is an English Jew, born in Paddington, London, in 1900.” Both women read the chapters of Emma’s novel and search through all the evidence they can turn up about her and her family to help them complete it.

We learn that Emma is one of 12 cousins, all born at 38 Marlborough Gardens, built by their grandfather, Jorem Forster (originally Faustus in Germany), a wealthy London banker. The most exotic of this dozen, Darius, makes an early theatrical entrance. His mother, Consuelo, an accomplished pianist and composer, is the daughter of an Italian, Count Rimini VI, and Darius styles himself Count Rimini VII. Both mother and son bring with them an air of sexual sophistication and intrigue that throws into doubt the surface correctness of the Victorian Forster households surrounding the gardens, a useful map of which makes up the book’s endpapers.

The English cousins are already experts in such famous battles as that of Marston Moor, and reenact them with their precious collections of lead soldiers. Darius, a born leader, soon takes control, and the military action eventually leaves the nursery to culminate outdoors in “The Marlborough War: An Account of a Battle That Took Place on English Soil the Morning of 26 May 1837,” to be followed by “The Aftermath,” in which a number of home truths are revealed. Emma’s closing words are “I was alone now. Our childhood was over. A way of life had ended.”

This summary does not do justice to the rich cast of characters portrayed in “City of Childhood” with its obligatory parade of nannies, governesses and tutors, pleasant and unpleasant, or its clergymen of various denominations and all the other requisites of a full-blown Victorian novel.

In spite of this full panoply, the reader is forced more than once to question what is being told. With three volumes still to come, one may simply be stepping into a trap, but a reviewer has to take that risk. Perhaps the answers will be given us in the second novel of this quartet, “The Metaphysics of Sex,” which Valerie Townsend Bayer is now writing. Meanwhile, here is an engrossing picture of Victorian life at several levels with dozens of hidden implications to ferret out and puzzles to solve.