Read in December 2013
Longbourn, by Jo Baker
Four stars
Readers looking for further adventures of the Bennet family should pass on Jo Baker’s Longbourn, which lacks both the acerbic commentary of the narrator of Pride and Prejudice and Lizzy Bennet’s heart and wit. But those interested in a realistic view of the servants’ side of the original Regency romance will enjoy this novel very much. While Austen’s young ladies dissect their social circle in the sitting room, Baker’s servant girls, Sarah and Polly, spend 18 hours a day lugging hot water upstairs and brimming chamber pots down, stirring simmering tubs of laundry and mending every tear, and collecting slops to feed the pigs and tea dregs to improve their sweeping. Rounding out the cast are Mrs. Hill, the housekeeper and cook, her butler husband and a new and mysterious 20-something footman, James Smith, but the central character is Sarah, who was orphaned at age six when her parents and brother died of typhus and spent six months in the poor house before being rescued by Mrs. Hill. Like Lizzy Bennet, Sarah is 20 when the story opens, and also like Lizzy, Baker has given her an inquiring mind, thirst for travel, and two potential suitors for whom her views are colored by both pride and prejudice. Baker spins her belowstairs tale directly from Austen’s novel, beginning each chapter with the sentence or phrase that inspired her take on the downstairs doings that occur simultaneously. The one exception is a 40-page flashback in the second half of the novel which provides some necessary back story plus something Austen ignored completely: the Napoleonic wars. If Longbourn serves as an interesting realistic corrective to the absurd artificiality of the upper crust English society Austen so vividly depicts, the section set in wartime Spain provides another as the women and children of the conquered cities endure complete degradation in their scrabble for survival. As a character, Sarah is certainly no match for Elizabeth Bennet, but she is compelling enough to carry this story, and while some readers may be put off by Lizzy as seen through her servants’ eyes, Baker’s versions of the Bennets and their circle are definitely in keeping with Austen’s. Clearly, Elizabeth Bennet is benevolent, sharing her books and castoffs with the serving girls, but that isn’t enough to completely excuse her on wash day when Sarah and Polly face endless scrubbing to remove the six inches of mud left on her petticoats by her walk to Netherfield Hall.