Review by New York Times Review
BELOVED BOOKS like "Pride and Prejudice" or "Gone With the Wind," or books left unfinished like "The Mystery of Edwin Drood," have always prompted efforts to imagine a continuing life for their characters. We cling to them in hopes that some of the qualities of Austen or Mitchell or Dickens can be recaptured, restoring our sense of delight, maintaining the mysterious bond that returns us to Mrs. Bennet declaring that "Netherfield Park is let at last" or Scarlett O'Hara deciding to wait until tomorrow to think about her problems. Alas, with few exceptions, these efforts rarely satisfy. It should be said at once that Jo Baker's "Longbourn" is an exception. Neither a sequel nor a disappointment, it's an affecting look at the world of "Pride and Prejudice," but from another point of view - the servants' hall, where other lives are simultaneously lived, with very different concerns and dramas. As we know from Austen's masterpiece, the Bennet family's respectable but rundown estate at Longbourn is under threat, destined to pass out of the family, since Mr. Bennet has no sons. Downstairs, the servants are worried too. The heir, Mr. Collins, would be likely to bring in his own people and turn out the present staff. Unlike the downtrodden victims in "Les Misérables," the Longbourn servants are relatively content with - or at least resigned to - their lot. But their lives are intertwined in ways one wouldn't have learned from reading Austen, where servants are barely mentioned. Emotions seethe downstairs as familiar events unfold upstairs, notably the arrival of the delightful (and marriageable) Mr. Bingley. Wickham, the sly villain of "Pride and Prejudice," is even more vile here, planning to seduce the little scullery maid, Polly, even as he's paying court to the feckless Lydia. There are other intrigues. A secret long held between the housekeeper, Mrs. Hill, and her employer, Mr. Bennet, comes to light. The new footman, James, seems to have a secret too - and then he suddenly disappears. Here are some of the trappings of the Regency novel as practiced by, say, Georgette Heyer, but with a darker view. Baker adds some new characters to the Austen pantheon, with considerable success. "Longbourn" is delightfully audacious; after all, Jane Austen is a very tough act to follow. "Pride and Prejudice" has been read and reread by enchanted readers since its publication in 1813. George Henry Lewes, the Victorian critic and partner of George Eliot, declared Austen to be "the greatest artist that has ever written," and Virginia Woolf called her "the most perfect artist among women, the writer whose books are immortal." Today these judgments have reached something close to cultish fervor. Yet Austen's great successor, Charlotte Brontë, was baffled by all this admiration. For her, Austen's work lacked "what throbs fast and full, though hidden, what the blood rushes through, what is the unseen seat of life and sentient target of death." It's one of literary history's most famous misjudgments. But if Charlotte Brontë had taken up the challenge of a sequel to "Pride and Prejudice," she might very well have hit upon the sort of broader, more sympathetic point of view Jo Baker has derived from the servants' quarters. Baker shares some of Brontë's qualities - a power of description, a feeling for the natural world, a regard for emotional turbulence - and she shows a comfort with the past that allows her to imagine it in a vivid way. Baker also reminds us that - of course - someone must have been up very early in the morning to lay the fires for the Bennets and must have spent all day cooking their meals and must have waited outside in the cold with the coach and horses till the girls emerged from a party. Of course, Longbourn must have had someone to stable the horses, sweep the rooms and change the sheets. Seen even more intimately, someone had to rinse, boil and bleach the huge quantity of rags required when the five Bennet daughters got their menstrual periods. (Probably all at the same time, as groups of women often do.) And then there was the washing out of perspiration stains and the bleaching of petticoats dragged in the mud. There were rips to be mended and buttons to be sewn. There were no indoor toilets, so there had to be chamber pots and someone to empty them into the "necessary," and it certainly wasn't the Bennets. Remember how indignant Mrs. Bennet was when Mr. Collins wondered which of the girls had cooked the excellent dinner? She "assured him with some asperity that they were very well able to keep a good cook, and that her daughters had nothing to do in the kitchen." However constrained their financial situation, the Bennets were in the upper middle class, like Austen herself, a parson's daughter, two of whose brothers were admirals. Servants were servants. With large imaginative sympathy and a detailed knowledge of early-19th-century housekeeping, Baker gives us a sobering look at the underside - or the practical side - of daily life circa 1812, where in a bourgeois household, however hard up, a staff of people, knowing their place, worked an 18-hour day, every day, to achieve for their employers even the minimum of comfort. In Baker's account, the Bennets are employers more considerate than many - Elizabeth gives the housemaid, Sarah, one of her dresses - but social distances are thoughtlessly taken for granted. Certain lines are never crossed, and certain others often are: an upperclass young man was never too grand to hang around downstairs in hopes of ruining some servant girl. Naturally, Austen knew about these particulars of daily life, as did George Eliot and Virginia Woolf, not just from books. Chamber pots were mentioned in the work of Shakespeare and Chaucer, and in the 18th-century novels Austen had certainly read. But by her day such mundane and sordid details of daily life weren't spoken of in polite novels. Baker deploys them to good effect not only for their intrinsic interest but as a moral corrective. She has also fashioned an absorbing and moving story about the servants at Longbourn: Sarah, the housemaid; Mr. and Mrs. Hill, who take charge of the stables and household; James, the new young footman; and little Polly, an orphan lucky enough to be spared the bleak fate that otherwise often awaited such girls (the streets, the poorhouse, a life of virtual slavery). The orphan is another beloved literary tradition. The defenseless child at the mercy of the world, unprotected by family or funds, is a resonant metaphor at any time. The orphan stands for the frightened waif in all of us, and here she's the central character, the novel's heroine. Like Polly, Sarah, the housemaid, is a foundling, taken in at Longbourn and fostered by Mrs. Hill. Most of the action is seen through Sarah's eyes as she grows into self-awareness and proves to have some of Jane Eyre's spunky resilience. She plans to better herself: "She bobbed a curtsy, and took her money up to her room, and put it away in her wooden box, along with the previous quarter's pay. If she could find it, and it was writ in English, she would borrow Heraclitus from the library." If part of Baker's inspiration could have come from Charlotte Brontë, there's also an aside straight out of "Les Misérables." Thanks to James, the footman, we learn something of the conditions encountered by young boys set adrift in the world, and the exploitative realities of army life and domestic service. But to mention these classics is not to condemn as pastiche a work that's both original and charming, even gripping, in its own right. ? DIANE JOHNSON'S most recent book, the memoir "Flyover Lives," will be published in January.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 13, 2013]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Elizabeth and Darcy take a backseat in this engrossing Austen homage, which focuses on the lives of the servants of Longbourn rather than the Bennet family. Baker's (The Undertow, 2012) novel finds Sarah, the Bennets' young, pretty housemaid, yearning for something more than washing soiled dresses and undergarments. The arrival of a handsome new footman, James Smith, creates quite a stir as he's hired after a heated discussion between Mrs. Hill, the cook and head of the servants, and Mr. Bennet. Sarah isn't sure what to make of the enigmatic new member of the household staff, but she's soon distracted by the Bingleys' charismatic footman, Ptolemy, who takes an interest in Sarah and regales her with his dreams of opening up a tobacco shop. Baker vividly evokes the lives of the lower classes in nineteenth-century England, from trips in the rain to distant shops to the struggles of an infantryman in the Napoleonic Wars. She takes a few liberties with Austen's characters Wickham's behavior takes on a more sinister aspect here but mostly Austen's novel serves as a backdrop for the compelling stories of the characters who keep the Bennet household running.--Huntley, Kristine Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The servants of the Bennett estate manage their own set of dramas in this vivid re-imagining of Pride and Prejudice. While the marriage prospects of the Bennett girls preoccupy the family upstairs, downstairs the housekeeper Mrs. Hill has her hands full managing the staff that keeps Longbourn running smoothly: the young housemaids, Sarah and Polly; the butler, Mr. Hill; and the mysterious new footman, James Smith, who bears a secret connection to Longbourn. At the heart of the novel is a budding romance between James and orphan-turned-housemaid Sarah, whose dutiful service belies a "ferocious need for notice, an insistence that she fully be taken into account." When an expected turn of events separates the young lovers, Sarah must contend with James's complicated past and the never-ending demands of the Bennetts. Baker (The Mermaid's Child) offers deeper insight into Austen's minor characters, painting Mr. Collins in a more sympathetic light while making the fiendish Mr. Wickham even more sinister. The Militia, which only offered opportunities for flirtations in the original, here serves as a reminder of the horrors of the Napoleonic Wars. Baker takes many surprising risks in developing the relationships between the servants and the Bennetts, but the end result steers clear of gimmick and flourishes as a respectful and moving retelling. A must-read for fans of Austen, this literary tribute also stands on its own as a captivating love story. First printing of 150,000. Agent: Clare Alexander, Aitken Alexander Associates. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
This brilliant and inventive novel brings Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice's below stairs to life, in the process creating as much intrigue and romance as the original. Baker (The Undertow) fleshes out the lives of the servants, footmen, and cooks to create a classic tale of love lost, perseverance, and early 19th-century life that will please even the most critical of Janeites. The story centers on the Bennets' maid, Sarah, a naive, likable young girl. When a new footman, James, joins the Longbourn staff, life is turned upside down and may never be the same again. Emma Fielding brilliantly narrates this novel with her smooth English accent and does a fantastic job bringing the characters to life using accents and inflections in all the right places. Verdict A must listen for fans of historical fiction, Austen, and Downton Abbey. ["...[D]ensely plotted and achingly romantic. This exquisitely reimagined Pride and Prejudice will appeal to Austen devotees and to anyone who finds the goings-on below the stairs to be at least as compelling as the ones above," agreed the starred review of the Knopf hc, LJ 8/15/13.-Ed.]-Erin Cataldi, Franklin Coll. Lib, IN (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
An irresistible retake on Pride and Prejudice alters the familiar perspective by foregrounding a different version of events--the servants'. Daring to reconfigure what many would regard as literary perfection, Baker (The Undertow, 2012, etc.) comes at Jane Austen's most celebrated novel from below stairs, offering a working-class view of the Bennet family of Longbourn House. While the familiar drama of Lizzie and Jane, Bingley and Darcy goes on in other, finer rooms, Baker's focus is the kitchen and the stable and the harsh cycle of labor that keeps the household functioning. Cook Mrs. Hill rules the roost, and maids Sarah and Polly do much of the hard work, their interminable roster of chores diminished a little by the hiring of a manservant, James Smith. Sarah is attracted to James, but he is mysterious and withdrawn, and soon, her eye is caught by another--Bingley's black footman, Ptolemy. James, though trapped in his secrets, has noticed Sarah too and steps in when she is on the verge of making an impulsive mistake. And so, the romance begins. Baker is at her best when touching on the minutiae of work, of interaction, of rural life. James' back story, though capably done, offers less magic. But a last episode, moving through grief and silence into understated romantic restoration, showcases a softly piercing insight. Sequels and prequels rarely add to the original, but Baker's simple yet inspired reimagining does. It has best-seller stamped all over it.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
