Longbourn

I've had Jo Baker's Longbourn (#371) reserved as a special reading treat for myself for a couple of months now.  I took my time reading this flip side of the Pride and Prejudice story, the invisible ceaseless activity and intrigue of the servants of Longbourn.  It's not a very pretty picture.  But it's one probably most of us can relate to better than the upstairs world of the well-to-do and the aristocrats that we wish we were.

With all the demands of a houseful of Bennetts upstairs, the grind of work downstairs is harsh and unrelenting for the meager staff of servants struggling to keep up.  There's the housekeeper, Mrs. Hill and her elderly husband.  There's also Sarah, the main character of this tale, orphaned at six and lucky to have been brought into the household, and the feckless Polly, still a child herself, but deemed old enough to earn her keep.  The sudden addition of James Smith as footman to the establishment throws the cat among the pigeons in the downstairs sphere.  The story of this bustling world is every bit as fraught with emotions, hopes dashed, secrets kept and the tedium of every day life as the intersecting world of Mr. and Mrs. Bennett and their five daughters.

You could easily read this book as a stand alone novel, but the more familiar you are with the storyline of Jane Austen's classic work you are, the more you'll appreciate how carefully Jo Baker has created her alternate universe, weaving the two fictional worlds together so seamlessly right down to the apt quotations from Pride and Prejudice which introduce each chapter of Longbourn.  It will be interesting to see if the film adaptation can do its part in illuminating the life of the servants as portrayed so brutally here. 

This dose of reality is not to be missed if you read Jane Austen or any of the myriad of Fan Fiction devoted to her characters.  You owe it to the memories of all those unsung souls who made the glamor of the period possible.