Longbourn - Jo Baker

If Elizabeth Bennet had the washing of her own petticoats, Sarah often thought, she’d most likely be a sight more careful with them.

In this irresistibly imagined belowstairs answer to Pride and Prejudice, the servants take center stage. Sarah, the orphaned housemaid, spends her days scrubbing the laundry, polishing the floors, and emptying the chamber pots for the Bennet household. But there is just as much romance, heartbreak, and intrigue downstairs at Longbourn as there is upstairs. When a mysterious new footman arrives, the orderly realm of the servants’ hall threatens to be completely, perhaps irrevocably, upended.

Jo Baker dares to take us beyond the drawing rooms of Jane Austen’s classic—into the often overlooked domain of the stern housekeeper and the starry-eyed kitchen maid, into the gritty daily particulars faced by the lower classes in Regency England during the Napoleonic Wars—and, in doing so, creates a vivid, fascinating, fully realized world that is wholly her own.

My thoughts:

This was a nice re-telling as it dealt with the servants at Longbourn. Yes things are going on upstairs, but they got their own issues downstairs.

We have of course Mrs and Mr Hill. Going on with their daily life of chores and something later on that I shall not talk about.

We have the maid Sarah who wishes Elizabeth would not walk through muddy fields when it's Sarah who has to spend a day trying to clean that damn petticoat. Sarah who catches the eye of a Netherfield servant.

Then there is Polly the younger maid, and James, the mysterious new servant who shows up. But who is he? I liked his story, it worked.

While the Bennets deal with heartbreak and balls, the servants clean after them. It also gave a portrait of Wickham that made sense, he is not a good man. But to my surprise I actually kind of kind of liked Mr Collins, he was nice. That too made sense.

Conclusion:

Dirty linens, making food, blasted petticoats, running to Meryton to deliver letters. it's another world for the downstairs folk. And it makes it into a great re-telling. It's their story, not the Bennets.

Cover

Nice

　

　

Hardcover, 332 pages
Published October 8th 2013 by Knopf
Historical fiction / Pride and Prejudice variation
Library