Reviewed: Jo Baker’s Longbourn

I’m a little bit of a Jane Austin nerd. Pride and Prejudice is on the short list of books I’ve read more than 3 times (it’s a very short list), so when I heard about Jo Baker’s Longbourn — a look at the world of Pride and Prejudice from the bottom up — I had to read it.

(From Goodreads)

Pride and Prejudice was only half the story.

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.

With television shows such as “Upstairs, Downstairs” and “Downton Abbey” gracing the American screens and shedding light on the lives of those behind the wealthy regency families, Jo Baker dives into the lives of those behind the beloved Bennett family. When I first dove into Baker’s telling, I was a little disappointed with the long “complaint” of laundry (dirty feminine rags to be precise) . I run a household. I get it. But plowing along you are quickly thrust into Austen-turned-Baker’s and  main character Sarah’s world, and it turns out to be quite an enjoyable read!

Jo Baker brings a new light on the story of Pride and Prejudice and it was a fun read and interesting to see the “other side” to the Bennett family.