FICTION

THE THIRD SISTER by Julia Barrett (Donald J. Fine: $22.95, 247 pp.). Julia Barrett captures Austen prose almost as well as Aiken, but one senses the emulation took up most of the writer’s energy--there seems to have been little left over with which to create an engaging plot.

The third sister in this novel is Margaret Dashwood, bit player to Elinor and Marianne in “Sense and Sensibility,” and she suffers just as Barrett, in the novel’s opening pages, says third sisters do; a compound of her sisters, the adult Margaret is an indistinct character, neither fish nor fowl. Is that why Barrett--the pseudonym of a Santa Monica-based writer--spends so much time with the married Dashwood sisters and Robert Dashwood and Marianne’s new friend Lady Clara?

Barrett seems more intent on elaborating the various characters and subplots of “Sense and Sensibility” than in developing her own themes, and the result is a novel suffering from standard-issue sequel-itis. Yes, Margaret does get her dashing young man, after first being wooed, accepted and betrayed by another, but we knew that would come to pass; it’s the manner of the triumph that matters in Austen, the reassurance that good taste and talent will ultimately prevail, and Barrett’s Margaret simply doesn’t earn her happy ending. She remains a cipher, and given the fractious, calculating, condescending nature of Margaret’s social adversaries--sisters-in-law Fanny and Lucy and her mother-in-law-to-be, all nicely rendered by Barrett in properly deep shallowness--it’s a wonder they don’t carry the day.