JANE AUSTEN A Biography By Claire Tomalin, Alfred A. Knopf: 324 pp., $27.50 : JANE AUSTEN Obstinate Heart A Biography By Valerie Grosvenor Myer, Arcade: 268 pp., $25.95 : JANE AUSTEN A Life By David Nokes, Farrar, Straus, & Giroux: 588 pp., $30

English fiction flows from Jane Austen’s pelisse as surely as Russian fiction does from Gogol’s overcoat. She founded character and caricature at the same time, which is the essentially satirical, essentially English approach to fictional people. From her, Dickens learned that characters can survive on one attribute and still be fat with life. From her, Forster learned that characters do not have to change to be real; they must merely reveal more of their stable essences as the novel progresses. Yet at the same time, the first stirrings of what would become Virginia Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness are also found in Austen’s novels; she invented a new semaphore for signaling a person’s thought as it is happening. These literary truths are apt to be loyally forgotten by Austen’s traditional worshipers: the filmgoers, the churchgoers, the antiquarians gardening for lost ideological roots, the little Englanders and little Anglophiles.

Austen was a ferocious innovator, and her innovations were largely achieved by the time she was 24. This tells us something about the elusive mixture of application and instinct in her working life. On the one hand, she made the great decisive leap forward in fiction from Samuel Richardson’s epistolary mode; on the other, she left behind barely an exegetical word about her aesthetics, her idea of fiction or her religion. We have only 160 letters by her, and most are rather tedious: the futile daily plow of seedless social events. Although fluttering mythologies have been let loose--the small letter-table in the parlor, the creaking door that alerted the novelist to unwanted visitors--we know almost nothing about how and when she wrote.

But she was a natural revolutionary in fiction; one can tell that. Almost as soon as she started writing playlets, squibs and family sketches as a teenager, she began to find new ways of representing fictional characters: In “Lesley Castle,” written when she was only 15, she produced an astonishingly accomplished portrait of a trivial narcissist, a woman more interested in the contents of her kitchen than in the content of her character. As a girl, she was already putting out fresh, sharp, leafy sentences. She wrote the first draft of “Pride and Prejudice” in 1796 before she was 21, but would wait 17 years for it to be published.

None of these three new biographies swells the evidentiary record, which has always been wiry, thanks to a diet of rumor and estimate. Each book must palpate the same familiar, elusive material. So we begin with Jane Austen’s father, a gently rational clergyman, intelligent, sincere, well-read and unusually fond of the novel, a form that still lacked a certain respectability. Jane Austen, George Eliot and Woolf all had fathers who encouraged their intellectual prosperity. Austen, like Woolf, was given the free run of the patriarchal library, which meant the run of the 18th century novel.

The family was large, and George Austen’s income had to be supplemented, three years before Jane’s birth in 1775, by taking in boys and converting the parsonage into a boarding school. One is always conscious, both in Austen’s biography and in her fiction, that she grew up in the earnest haute bourgeoisie (though Jane’s mother had noble relatives). Her fiction, which is either celebrated or attacked for being conservative, is actually a strenuous argument in favor of the deserving poor--deserving not because of gentility but because of goodness. Austen’s ideal world, glimpsed in the puff of harmony that is exhaled at the end of her novels when the heroine gets her husband, would be an ethical meritocracy, in which the best dowry a woman can bring to her match is her goodness. The best virtues are earned, not bestowed, and are internal: Austen is a true Protestant radical. (The prayers she wrote as a little girl are full of self-denial and correction.)

Austen fell in love once and agreed to marry once. Her great love, Tom Lefroy, was plucked from her before anything might develop (the Austen family was considered too poor). She said farewell to him in December of 1795 and never saw him again. Seven years later, in 1802, the farcically named Harris Bigg-Wither asked her to marry him. She agreed grayly and passionately reversed her decision the next morning. All three of these new biographies agree that those two events shadowed her life and her fiction. Both experiences, in a sense, were triumphs of passion, despite their air of sadness, and might explain the deeply romantic spirit of her novels: She lost Tom Lefroy, but at least she had always known what love signified, and when she rejected Bigg-Wither, whom she did not love, she did so to fortify the integrity of that love.

These three biographies must wrestle with shadows, for Austen is almost Shakespeare-like in her capacity for disappearance. There are, for instance, comically differing accounts of how she looked; her personality, to judge from her letters, was delightfully plastic and contradictory. She could be cruel, waspish, satirical and flirtatious. But she was also generous, true, reticent and passionate. Claire Tomalin’s biography is exemplary, a triumph of seasoned sympathy; Valerie Grosvenor Myer’s is introductory; and David Nokes’ is finely eccentric.

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Tomalin is the most natural biographer of the three, and throughout her book we feel a watchful consanguinity with Austen. Tomalin reminds us, gently, that Austen was a woman and that her biographer is a woman. She is the only biographer here properly to consider the difficulties for a young female writer of growing up in a household of loud boys. She is the only biographer daring enough to calculate the literary cost of Austen’s marriage to Harris Bigg-Wither: “We would naturally rather have ‘Mansfield Park’ and ‘Emma’ than the Bigg-Wither baby Jane Austen might have given the world, and who would almost certainly have prevented her from writing further books.” Tomalin’s delicate book reminds us that the task of biography is not merely the elegant arrangement of facts (which is what Grosvenor Myer does) or the bravura creative reconstruction of a vanished reality (which is what Nokes does). There is such a thing as wisdom, and Tomalin is at her best when being wise about Austen’s gender. She is the only biographer, for instance, to mark the full importance of Austen’s profit from “Sense and Sensibility”: “The importance of this first money she had earned for herself can best be appreciated by women who have endured a similar dependence. . . . A fixed order had been moved.” (It was a decent sum of money. Austen made 140 pounds from that novel; her father’s living had paid him 210 pounds per annum).

Nokes, who is a distinguished scholar of 18th century satire, behaves as if the survival of Austen’s reputation depended on his convincing us that she was really Jonathan Swift. This is often exciting. Nokes’ target is what he calls “the Austen myth.” He reminds us that Austen’s birthplace, in rural Hampshire, is not “the nursery landscape of a vanished pastoral arcadia” but a place of poverty and hardship and muddy lanes. His Austen is more brutal than Tomalin’s, more misanthropic and satirical (the Austen who writes of “another stupid party last night” in one of her letters to her sister, Cassandra). He is very detailed, and acute, on Austen’s juvenilia and on the books she read throughout her life. His chief vice is that, unlike the patiently paleographic Tomalin, he “novelizes” the gaps in the historical record. There is rather too much second-guessing (“That night, as she lay on her bed . . . “) and emotional inflation, for, of course, when biographers compensate for factual absence, they compensate with invented feeling. Thus, Nokes tells us at one point that “Jane was furious” that Cassandra did not reply to one of her letters and harshly rebuked her; but an inspection of the entire relevant letter to her sister reveals only a swift tartness, briskly abandoned.

But Nokes’ emphasis is right. What moves us is Austen’s almost philosophical loyalty to truth. One sees this in a letter of 1808, when Jane, apparently brutally, asks Cassandra if she has seen the corpse of their recently deceased sister-in-law: “I suppose you see the Corpse--how does it appear?” In “Persuasion,” when Louisa Musgrove falls from the Cobb at Lyme Regis and seems dead, Austen writes that workmen and sailors rushed to help, or “at any rate, to enjoy the sight of a dead young lady.” Austen was unflinching. Indeed, the very plot of an Austen novel is rational and problem-solving: a progress toward unfettered vision. Her heroine does not, in the course of the story, really learn things about herself; as the novel moves forward, certain veils are pierced and obstacles removed, so that the heroine can see the world more clearly. Austen is not therapeutic but hermeneutic.

Austen’s novels dance with the poetry of rationalism. One thinks of Anne Elliott at the end of “Persuasion,” whom Austen describes as pitying everyone around her, “as being less happy than herself. . . . Her happiness was from within.” Now Anne is in love and is pitying those who are not, just as Levin does in “Anna Karenina” when he secures Kitty. But Austen’s point is stronger than that. Tolstoy describes Levin’s rhapsody as a temporary advantage: He is in a spasm of early love, which will pass. It is a sublime hallucination. Austen, by contrast, suggests that Anne will always be happier than the people around her. And why? Because her happiness is “from within.”

It is consciousness that makes one happy; consciousness is intelligence, and consciousness is inwardness. Anne’s terrible, snobbish father and sister might fall in love, but Anne would still be happier than they because she has an internal intelligence that they will always lack. There is a clear hierarchy in Austen’s world: The people who matter think inwardly, and the rest speak. Or rather: the people who matter speak to themselves, and the rest speak to each other. When one thinks, in a snapshot, of Austen’s fiction, one thinks of a woman alone, reading a letter, “in extreme agitation.” And even when the agitation is not happy, it is always welcome. Inwardness is a source of happiness. I suspect that Jane Austen, so enigmatic, so private and apparently contradictory, went through life as if she were the possessor of a clandestine happiness. She saw things more clearly than other people and therefore pitied their cloudiness.

In her last days, terribly ill, she reported that she was still able to get up and “eat her meals in a rational way.” That word, so carefully chosen by a woman undisarrayed by death, is beautifully, comprehensively telling. She did everything in a rational way, and her novels are the quintessence of rationality.