BOOK REVIEW : Picture Faust as a Female--and an Unhappy Grandmother : FAUSTINE <i> by Emma Tennant</i> ; Faber & Faber $9.99, 140 pages

Young Ella--she has no last name--has been dumped, she thinks, by her mother, about as definitively as is possible for anyone to be dumped. Anna, that mother of hers, runs a very small feminist publishing house in England; she works for “dear life” and has dropped off her toddler-daughter 12,000 miles away in Melbourne, Australia. Ella stays on that continent for 23 years in a day-care center for foreign orphans run by kindly strangers, living off the myth that at least her dead Grandma Muriel used to love her.

When Ella inadvertently finds out that her grandmother may still be alive in England, the young woman immediately picks up and flies off to her mother country. She leaves a broken-hearted orphan behind who idolizes her--a little boy called Chi-ren (read “children”). Whenever a woman starts off on an adventure of her own, the author suggests, a child is almost always bound to get hurt.

The “story” of “Faustine” is, of course, the story of Faust, but the style and scenery belong to Henri Alain-Fournier’s exquisite literary fantasy, “The Wanderer.” Like the hero in that book, Ella is transported to a magical manor house. It’s close to Stonehenge, where “hippies” or “Gypsies” still dance and sing, awaiting the summer solstice. Intent as she is on finding her beloved grandma, Ella takes time out to be momentarily heartsick: What happened to her own youth? She’s 26 already and has never spent the night outside, dancing until dawn.

Once inside the crumbling British mansion, Ella finds two separate visions--or versions--of the past; one, the fairly standard Victorian set of crumbling artifacts she might have expected, and the other--much more disturbing and evocative--a set of memorabilia.

Here are photographs and autographs and costumes from the late 1960s, and the glowing pictorial icon from that time, a spidery beauty immortalized by Andy Warhol in one stunning miniskirt after another--the astonishingly beautiful and famous Lisa Crane.

Ella is here to find her grandmother, but she pauses to wonder, whatever happened to the ethereal and lovely Lisa Crane?

The reader--either of the book or of this review--must surely guess by now that Grandma Muriel and Lisa Crane are one and the same.

What has happened, in the proverbial nutshell, is this: Muriel, in the very old days, was abandoned by her husband. Her only daughter, Anna, in revolt from that displeasing scenario, bore one child of her own and then began to work. It was Muriel who got stuck taking care of little Ella.

All the hot chocolate, all the bedtime stories that Ella remembers with yearning were delivered grudgingly and absent-mindedly. The heartless plan was to run the toddler in public parks until she dropped from fatigue. Then Grandma Muriel and one of her aging girlfriends could brood over the injustices of life, get drunk and watch TV.

All this was back in the ‘60s, the age of the miniskirt, of all-night parties and rock ‘n’ roll. An age when a woman over 30 was invisible. Muriel was then 48. Could she be blamed if she took up the devil’s offer to be forever young?

“Faustine” is as constricting and oppressive as a bound foot, and it’s meant to be. The question, explicit or implicit on every page, is, “What about the Chi-ren?” If you have a child and then go to work, it’s a crime against humanity. If you’re past childbearing years and dare to think about yourself, it’s a double crime.

Every minute you think about a chin lift, do a sit-up, go out dancing, stay up late, buy a new dress, worry about a breast implant, wish for a life that doesn’t involve dandling a child or grandchild on your flabby thighs, or spooning custard into him or her, you’re depriving the “children” of the attention and love they’re convinced they deserved.

And yet to serve a life sentence of domesticity after your first child is born, to be forever deprived of “beauty, youth, desire, power and money” is a worse hell than the Devil himself could devise.

Several reviewers have called “Faustine,” by Emma Tennant, a “bitter” book. But it does no more than lay out the dilemma and remind us that in the ‘60s, “Sympathy for the Devil” was an all-time greatest hit.