THE WORLD OF JANE AUSTEN: Her Houses in Fact and Fiction <i> by Nigel Nicolson, photographs by Stephen Colover (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, distributed by Trafalgar Square: $29.95; 192 pp.</i> ).

The Gothic atmosphere of Northanger Abbey fired Catherine Morland’s already hyperactive imagination. The comfort and orderliness of Mansfield Park made it a haven to Fanny Price. And a long look at Pemberley, the commodious stately home of the aloof Fitzwilliam Darcy, helped Elizabeth Bennet overcome her prejudice against his pride. Houses--and their surroundings--play a notable role in Jane Austen’s fiction, even if their significance is rightly subordinated to that of character.

In this urbane, informative medley of text and photographs, that well-known man of letters Nigel Nicolson makes no exaggerated claims about the link between Austen and architecture: The novelist, he argues persuasively, was careful not to draw her fictional houses directly after real ones, and had little interest in architectural features except for what they might suggest about the manners and morals of her characters. But what he does accomplish in this diverting book is to illustrate some of the salient featues of the physical world in which Austen lived, from the cozy, prosperous farms and parks of Kent and her native Hampshire to the elegance and charm of Bath--a city that “should have been Jane Austen’s ideal town,” but was unaccountably portrayed in her novels as “hectic and trivial.” As for London, the country-bred Jane pronounced it a “ ‘scene of dissipation and vice,’ ” although Nicolson suspects she enjoyed her brief visits there. Austen’s ambit was limited, yet she knew, in depth, “every southern county from Kent to Devon.” She loved the countryside and thought nothing of walking five or six miles through sodden fields--in a pair of light slippers! Dancing was also a favorite pastime (note the picture), and, more surprisingly, bathing in the sea, which she preferred to do on chilly autumn mornings. Jane-ites should appreciate this attractively and intelligently illustrated foray into a bygone world, recreated with sympathy, wit and understanding.