Longbourn by Jo Baker

I’m not sure if you can actually start a comment with an aside, but I’m a rebel, so I’ll do it anyway…

When I was in college in the dim and distant past of the mid 80’s, a girl in one of my classes commented that I reminded her of Elizabeth Bennett. I wasn’t sure if that was a compliment or not because at that time, I hadn’t read Pride and Prejudice. The comment prompted me to remedy the oversight, and by the time I’d finished I decided that I was pretty damn happy with the comparison.

This came back into my mind when I was reading Longbourn by Jo Baker which is a ‘what if’ might have been happening ‘below stairs’ while the drama of Pride and Prejudice is playing out. What it does is make you see Austen’s characters through the other side of the telescope, and that’s an illuminating view for many of the characters we know so well.

But firstly I’m here to talk about Longbourn. A good friend recommended it, and I’m glad she did because it is delightful. Our heroine is Sarah, a housemaid at Longbourn who has the temerity to look outwards beyond the confines of her employers daily needs. But as with all good novels, even unsettled characters need something to push and prod at their unsettled state, and in Sarah’s case it is the arrival of two new footmen into her world – the suspiciously blandly named James Smith, whom Mr Bennet unexpectedly employs at Longbourn, and the wonderfully named Ptolemy Bingley who is employed by Mr Bingley of Netherfield.

While this is mainly Sarah’s story, Longbourn also tells a broader tale of all the servants – their petty hierarchies, their hopes, disappointments and how they reconcile their lives in relation to each other and to their masters and mistresses. I felt engaged with all the characters, and while my focus was rightly on Sarah, the other characters were always there, fully drawn and realised, full of life and in some cases, full of surprises, so I take my bonnet off to Jo Baker for creating such a believable and beguiling cast. And she has obviously done her research about the lives of servants in big houses of the time – you can almost smell the cooking in the kitchen and the soap being made and the petticoats being soaked to get the mud off where young mistresses have been careless in their walks. Longbourn is also very good at illuminating how invisible servants are and how those above stairs take so much for granted, because they don’t know any different.

The other end of the telescope is an interesting perspective and by giving a possible backstory to the servants, it also shows possible reasons why some of Austen’s characters behaved the way they did in the original. I was also fascinated to see Elizabeth post marriage. We know dear reader that she married Darcy, but a glimpse of her life afterwards is an interesting speculation in its own right. It is also interesting to me that this isn't a rewrite of Pride and Prejudice - we only get to know of certain events from that book when one of the servants is directly involved in the action, otherwise all of the Bennet's drama takes place 'off camera'.

Taking on a sacred cow like Pride and Prejudice takes some nerve, and I would say that Jo Baker more than pulls it off. You could say it is high quality fan fiction, because she obviously loves the original and treats it tenderly and then uses it as a springboard to go down roads not travelled, which is also what good fan fiction does. This could lead into a completely different discussion about why it is acceptable for professional writers to riff off established texts, but amateur writers who do the same are often told they should get off their arses and write something original instead of mining the possibilities of  someone else’s work. As a sometime fan fiction reader and writer (hopefully a good one…) I’ve heard that said on more than one occasion, and as I say, it’s a discussion for another time, but ‘what ifs’ are tantalizing to professionals and amateur writers alike.

The bottom line is that in Longbourn, Jo Baker has taken Austen’s original and made something entirely her own. Yes, it will make me go back and read Pride and Prejudice with new eyes, but even if you haven’t read Pride and Prejudice, Longbourn is a joy to read in its own right and I was rooting for Sarah just as much as I ever did for Elizabeth Bennet back in the day when I was first discovering whether my classmate’s comment was a compliment. All these years later I still think it was.

Longbourn was published in 2013 and my copy was published by Vintage Books