Customer Reviews

Longbourn

'There could be no wearing of clothes without laundering, just as surely as there could be no going without clothes, not in Hertfordshire anyway, and not in September.'

I liked the premise the opening sentence makes clear - seeing the events of Pride and Prejeudice from the point of view of the servants and gaining insight into the lives of the ordinary classes that Austen barely mentions. The novel opens well but is somewhat formulaic. It's as if Baker decided to make a list of what Jane Austen leaves out: war, politics, sex with overworked servants and then wrote a novel to address those. Clearly Austen didn't write state of the nation novels but her dialogue was great, her characters always believable, and her wit sparkling. Despite the current fashion of considering P&P; to be chick lit, it is a sharply observed novel on one strata of society. It is pitch perfect. This novel strained my credulity - can you imagine Mr Collins having a chat about his choice of Bennet girl with a maid? For me, it added few new insights into Jane Austen's novel despite key references to slavery and fortunes made from sugar. Those are important issues, as were the difficulties of dismissed servants and I would have felt that more if Jo Baker had been able to simply concentrate on her own characters. I suppose that is the key point. A book like Wide Sargasso Sea (Penguin Modern Classics) casts new light back on our reading of Jane Eyre (Wordsworth Classics) and particularly its view of women and the exploitation of the colonies. I don't think this novel pulled that off - perhaps because it tried to pack too much in.

The strongest section is the first - a well imagined account of laundry day from the point of view of Sarah, the maid and main protagonist. 'If Elizabeth had the washing of her own petticoats, Sarah often thought, she'd most likely be a sight more careful with them,' is a good example of where we gain a different view of Elizabeth Bennet's trampling over muddy fields to her sister. The drudgery that supports the lives of the Bennets is well described, as is the contrast with the much larger house of the Bingleys.

I think an important question is whether the novel could stand on its own without the link to the original. In my view it doesn't, despite some enjoyable passages. The ending of Longbourn departs entirely from Pride and Prejudice and is the weakest part of the novel. I suppose I should learn my lesson from this, and Death Comes to Pemberley, and leave this sub genre of Austen prequels, sequels and re-imaginings alone.

Having said that, I seem to be in the minority of the reviewers here.

Jane Austen is a favourite author of mine and, as such, I have always avoided reading any sequels, prequels or retellings of her novels, as I feel they would only disappoint - however Jo Baker's 'Longbourn' is something rather different and I must admit that I was pulled into this book from the very first pages. 'Longbourn' focuses on the lives of the servants who work for the Bennet family (from 'Pride and Prejudice') and the story is told almost entirely from the servants' perspective, so there is a lot of gritty 'downstairs' life and very little of the more genteel 'upstairs' variety.

In the servants' quarters we meet our main heroine, the housemaid Sarah, an attractive and determined young woman, similar in age to the older Bennet girls, but obviously leading a very different life. Then there is the cook/housekeeper, Mrs Hill (who has a painful secret she has had to keep hidden for years), her husband, Mr Hill, the butler (a man with secrets of his own) and lastly, twelve-year-old Polly, the kitchen maid. Into their busy, but quiet and uneventful lives arrives a new footman, James Smith, a dark, attractive man with a rather mysterious past, who finds himself falling for Sarah. However, Sarah, although initially attracted to James, feels a little rebuffed by his reluctance to discuss his past life, and consequently she finds herself becoming rather interested in the very good-looking Mulatto manservant, Ptolemy, who works for the Bingleys at Netherfield Park. But what is it that James is trying to hide from Sarah and should Sarah really be considering Ptolemy in a romantic light? (No spoilers, we learn most of this early on in the novel and there is a lot more for prospective readers to discover and enjoy).

This is a very atmospheric and wonderfully described story where the reader follows the servants in their day-to-day work, so we experience Sarah's back-breaking work with the family laundry ("If Elizabeth Bennet had the washing of her own petticoats, Sarah thought, she would be more careful not to tramp through muddy fields"); we feel the pain of Sarah's chapped and chilblained fingers; we clean and blacklead the grates; we beat the Turkish carpets and sprinkle tea leaves to gather the dust; we even have to empty the evil-smelling chamber pots that the genteel folk upstairs leave for Sarah to dispose of. And, as the author cleverly weaves threads from the original 'Pride and Prejudice' into her story, we also experience certain aspects of Bennet family life and are able to eavesdrop on family conversations, which makes for very entertaining reading.

In addition, Jo Baker is not just adept at describing indoor life - her descriptions of the Hertfordshire countryside were a pleasure to read, and her brief, but powerful depiction of a certain soldier's wartime experiences revealed during the course of the book was an interesting and involving aspect of the story. This, therefore, is a novel which works successfully on different levels: as an exploration of injustice, inequality and poverty, but also as a romantic and absorbing story of love and loyalty, and despite my initial misgivings I am pleased to say that I was really entertained by this novel and read the entire book in one enjoyable sitting. Attractively presented and with each chapter headed with an extract from the original novel, Jo Baker's 'Longbourn' is a richly imagined story that makes for an engaging weekend, bedtime or anytime read, and one for which the film rights have already been acquired.

4 Stars.

Seduced by the rave reviews from so many impressive sources I bought this book but soon became very disappointed with it. The dialogue is often dire and the plot seems clumsy. In all I found this book boring and fail to understand how it was praised so highly.

Confession; I love Pride and Prejudice (not quite as much as Persuasion, but...) It's the book I've read and reread more than any other. So I must admit to more than a slice of apprehension on first reading Longbourn, in which Jo Baker tiptoes below stairs to reflect the servants' story. I need not have worried. Baker takes the original and respectfully, assuredly serves up a new tale full of hope, betrayal, anxiety, war and (yes) while the Bennet family play out their own histories upstairs. This is very much a fresh and completely satisfying entire novel all its own, with Baker's own voice. We have a new, richly drawn heroine and hero, not without their own flaws. There's no flinching from the grimier and grittier side of life in servitude, but there are so many light moments of hopefulness and blossoming romance that keep the reader turning the pages. One for Austen fans, yes, absolutely - but read it for itself, I really urge you. Longbourn deserves that and so much more. Wonderful!

I really wanted to like this book; I thought it was a good idea to tell the story of the Longbourn servants, showing how little their lives and concerns intersected with those of their employers. And there are some really good things in it. Even more than the note that Lizzy Bennet would have been less carefree about getting her petticoats muddy if she had had to scrub the mud out, I liked the point that in holding back the news of Mr Collins' visit till the day of his arrival just to surprise his family, Mr Bennet is quite uncaringly subjecting the servants not merely to a scramble of last-minute work but actual well-founded fear - Mr Collins will be the next owner of Longbourn, and they have only one chance to make a good enough first impression on him that he will keep them on in his employ and not turn them out.

But, some things just won't do. Jo Baker has obviously done loads of research into domestic life of the period and so she must certainly know that she has given the Bennets an impossibly small household of servants. It's canon that Mr Bennet has �2000 a year plus the interest of his wife' fortune; that they don't save any of it; that they keep a carriage and carriage horses plus at least one riding horse, they have a large garden including a fashionable 'wilderness' and they have coverts of game birds. A household of that size, with that kind of income, would have had - would have needed - at least eleven servants: Samuel and Sarah Adams' 'The Complete Servant', published only 12 years after P&P;, states that the household of a gentleman with a family and an income of �1,500-�2000 would require 'A Cook, Housekeeper, two House-maids, Kitchen-Maid, and Nursery-Maid, or other female Servant; with a Coachman, Groom, Footman, Gardener, and an assistant in the Garden and Stable'. Instead, at the start of her book Baker has given the Bennets only a cook-housekeeper, two maids and one elderly manservant. That's only one maidservant more than the impoverished Dashwood ladies in Sense & Sensibility needed to run their poky cottage with 'dark narrow stairs, and a kitchen that smoked'! (And in real life, a smaller staff than Parson Woodford and his spinster niece needed in his Norfolk rectory, where they kept no carriage and sent their laundry to be done by a washerwoman, on his modest stipend of �300 a year.)

This matters, because if you're going to major on 'gritty reality', you simply have to keep it real. Yes, household work in the Regency era was hard and squalid in the extreme; but the below-stairs community of Longbourn wouldn't have been anything like as small and isolated as Baker writes it.

I do have other gripes. I've no objection(as some other reviewers seem to have) to Baker including references to sex such as JA couldn't have dreamed of discussing. However, I found the revelation of Mr Hill's love life unconvincing - not that a Regency servant couldn't have had such a love life, but the way the information was dumped on the reader as 'this is a plot point, take it or leave it' without any attempt to weave it into character. And I don't buy Wickham as a paedophile for a moment. It's canon, after all, that Wickham pursues grown-up girls for fun as well as profit, which real-life paedophiles very rarely do. (Nor, come to that, can I believe that any 12-year-old workhouse-reared Regency housemaid could possibly not have known what it meant when a gentleman told you he'd give you sweets if you 'were sweet to him'.) And Baker read two or three books on the Peninsular War but she simply hadn't made sense of the material, so the whole section dealing with James Smith's misfortunes as a soldier in the war in Spain is lamentable; it's full of errors and impossibilities.

It's very sad, because there was a good idea here, and I think Baker is talented enough as a writer to have made a better fist of it than she did.

Jo Baker's Longbourn is a wonderful novel. I've read some of her work before, and seen she has a welcome facility to fillet the grand narrative and reveal the stories of those who have been deliberately or accidentally forgotten, so was intrigued to see if and how this might play with Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. The result is very pleasing: it shows that Baker is also an astute and wry satirist. And quite a bold one too - because let's face it, you have to be to take on Austen and her most famous novel (which I am a fan of, and it is clear that Baker is as well). But Austen is also a British institution, and Pride and Prejudice has had some very glossy treatments, so it's nice to see the gloss stripped away and to be taken down into the world of head-cheese and pig-fat and flogging, and all those chapped hands scarred with lye - to see the frantic, constant labour that supports the serenity of Regency gentlefolk and their genteel poverty.
All this isn't just social comment, but is done in a heartfelt way with some sweet and genuine characters. I liked - a lot - Sarah's increasingly melodramatic results to James bumping her shin, just to try to get a reaction from unresponsive Hill; and Polly chattering away in the background throughout the novel, providing a running commentary to events and developments; and Ptolemy's mix of self-assuredness and timidity when he's trying to woo Sarah. The coterie of people below stairs get to have a closeness among themselves, and they're allowed to have ambitions and sensibilities. Refreshingly, this is done at the expense of Elizabeth and Darcy: Elizabeth can't comprehend that anybody other than a gentlemen could be referred to as `Mr', and Darcy is no sexy, sodden Colin Firth, but a big slab of a man so caught up in hierarchy and position that he cannot see beyond it. Baker also gives Austen's buffoons a nicely sympathetic treatment. I've long felt sorry for Mr Collins, so it was good to see that he's socially awkward in a milieu where social awareness is everything.
Can I point out, too, that Jo Baker has a fine eye for a strong and simple image. Not an easy thing to do. George Eliot does it in Middlemarch with the water droplet and the pier-glass; Dean Friedman does it in Well well said the Rocking-chair; and Baker does it with the caddis-fly in this novel. She should deserve applause for that alone.
I think some might dismiss this novel because of previous gimmicky P & P treatments, but that wouldn't be fair. Also, it would be denying themselves a reading treat. No zombies, no whodunit, but a story and characters that complement and undermine the grandness of Pemberley and Netherfield and Longbourn. I read a thing where the plainer birds often have the lovelier song, and this novel reminded me of that, because Jo Baker allows the upstairs people to strut and preen and squawk, while detailing the more interesting trills of the nut-brown people below. Very recommended.

In a mash-up between Pride & Prejudice and Upstairs, Downstairs, this delves beneath the sunny surface of Austen's beloved novel to reveal another story peopled by the unnamed, invisible and silenced servants who keep Longbourn running.

This is a subversive re-telling, and one which runs alongside P&P; rather than being a sequel. In the Longbourn parlour-maid Sarah, the mysterious new servant James Smith, and Bingley's glamorous black footman from Netherfield Hall we at first are given a story which shadows the familiar one. James' pride and Sarah's prejudice, especially, are interestingly done and throw light back on the original.

The last third of the book detaches itself from P&P; and wanders far from Longbourn in both time and place, revealing some of the realities of early nineteenth-century life which Austen writes out. This is the least successful part of the book for me, and some of the plot workings are too obvious to hold any narrative tension.

That Austen's fiction erases the political both in terms of the Napoleonic wars, colonialism and the slave-trade upon which many of her characters' fortunes are based (particularly obvious in Mansfield Park) is almost a common-place of academic criticism, and this book picks up on that. It's more concerned, though, with the domestic realities of the servants who scrub Elizabeth's famously muddy petticoats and boots, who sit up half-asleep while waiting for the Bennetts to return from a ball, and who still have to start their working day at 4.30am while the Bennett girls are warmly tucked up in bed.

Baker makes no attempt to mimic Austen's style (thankfully) but this is an intelligent intervention into a famous novel which critiques it even while re-telling it from a transgressive angle. For a darker, though ultimately recuperative, story which reveals the shady undertow to the glossy glamour of Austen, this is highly recommended.

(This review is from an ARC courtesy of the publisher)

Forget the idiosyncratic modernisms that have more place in a Mills and Boon, the dwelling on the unpalatable aspects of life Jane Austen would never have the servants' mention.
This author has absolutely no conception of the social mores of the time.
Would Mr Bennet really install his one time mistress and mother of his illegitimate child under the same roof as his wife and daughters? And then compound the insult by later installing his bastard?
Is Jo Baker really so bereft of ideas she has to insult one of Britain's best loved authors by producing this derivative tripe.
I can only despair of an educational system that has produced readers who believe this book has any merit.

Well! What can I say about this seriously exceptional book? If the grading system offered more than five stars I would award them gladly. I found so many possible areas for discussion regarding the links between 'Longbourn' and 'Pride and Prejudice' this whole review could have turned into a book on its own. I simply loved it. Ideally, the two stories should be read concurrently because it's almost impossible to stop yourself from making the leap to what's happening in P&P; from events occurring or referred to in 'Longbourn'; although the household staff may never know the full truth of what goes on 'upstairs', we, the readers of P&P;, of course do.

Ms Baker has added richness and depth to Jane Austen's work in this fine parallel history. I was fascinated by the way she allowed us to see beneath the surface of characters like Mr and Mrs Bennet, adding a little shadow to the sunshine. Jane Austen intended the Bennets to be largely comical characters and I think that's right, but here we also see something of their humanity, their fallibility and how Mr Bennet in particular, has to live with the choices he has made.

Sarah too is an exceptional young woman with a strong sense of self which sees her through the drudgery of her day-to-day life without breaking her spirit. At the end of the book she too has a choice to make. I think she makes the right one. After all, it is the person who truly 'sees' us who makes us complete.

"If Elizabeth Bennet had the washing of her own petticoats, Sarah thought, she would be more careful not to tramp through muddy fields".
That's an irresistible premise for lovers of Pride and Prejudice - we all remember plenty of scenes in the classic BBC adaptation with Lizzie doing just that, but who has ever given a thought to all that extra work for the skivvies below stairs?
Pride and Prejudice spin-off books seem to be two a penny these days, but this one sounded particularly promising: just who was Hill, the Bennet housekeeper, and what was life like for her and all the other Longbourn servants? It's an interesting idea, and after seeing all the glowing reviews I was expecting a four or five star read. But after a really good opening scene, with the maids up to their necks in dirty Bennet underwear, it all went downhill pretty quickly.
So what went wrong?
Perhaps the author should have spent longer deciding what the book was meant to be about. Did she want to tell the story of overworked maids in early 19th century households through the character of Sarah? Or to give us a rather melodramatic spin on the unhappy Bennet marriage, involving an upstairs/downstairs love affair and a mysterious soldier on the run? A prequel about Hill and Mr Bennet, in the style of Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (Penguin Modern Classics), might have worked better, saving the maid's story for a sequel.
And maybe she should have been braver in doing without all the references to the original novel, underlined by the quotes which head each chapter. There are far too many Downton Abbey-ish scenes with Sarah the maid helping Lizzie and Jane get dressed - we've all read Pride and Prejudice, we don't need to keep being told what's going on upstairs. And having established that the servants are all overworked and hard done-by it soon becomes very repetitive, and we have to wait until the end for all the mysterious longings and unexplained looks to be explained - I don't think I've ever read a more disconnected flashback.
The story is very formulaic and heavy-handed, too. Another reviewer has pointed out that it's as if the author made a list of everything that Austen doesn't mention, from slavery to soiled underwear, and made sure to tick off each item. Unfortunately this makes for a very disjointed and unfocussed novel - the inclusion of the token black servant is particularly clunky, while the arrival of the mysterious footman is simply odd. The graphic account of his army days reads like an afterthought inserted to tick another of those boxes, and belongs in a different sort of book altogether. And I just didn't buy the plot twist, when his origins are revealed, or the happy ending.
For me, Jo Baker is another one of those authors who spends a lot of time telling you about everything and everyone, but whose stories and characters never quite come alive. But it was a good idea, it's readable, and she's obviously done her research. And some things are done very well, like the opening washday scene and the convincing portrayal of Wickham, which shows a horrible new side to his character that's all too credible.
But in the end this book just didn't deliver for me - yet another disappointment, and a reminder that I really must leave these Austen spin-offs well alone.