'Longbourn' by Jo Baker,
Published by Doubleday
RRP $37.99
For all the Jane Austen fans out there, this
is a delicious 'subterranean take' of life at Longbourn, the Bennet household,
before Pemberley. I will commit
blasphemy here and now, and say that this is by far the more interesting
romance If I had to choose between
Elizabeth & Mr Darcy, I'd choose the romance in Jo Baker's novel 'Longbourn',
absolutely. My heart was hijacked. I
really, really cared and abandoned myself to the delights of true love. A little heart racing even, now and then, or
was that just me turning the pages a bit faster
.
Jo
Baker has written the story of the housemaids, the housekeeper and the footman,
the servants who kept the Bennet household humming along while the girls
upstairs concerned themselves with suitable or unsuitable husbands. You need not have even read Pride and
Prejudice to enjoy this novel, but of course, it adds another whole layer if
you have - and too, yes, I will confess, I am thinking of re-reading Pride and
Prejudice. Indeed, I have to admit to
have only ever reading it the once.
Shameful, I know, but true.
While
Mrs Bennett is wringing her hands in despair at the lack of suitable husbands
for her daughters, downstairs Sarah the housemaid is wringing out the personal
laundry. Every intimate item of
clothing is hand-washed and when the
Bennet girls traipse prettily across fields of green, it is Sarah who has to
scrub the mud from the petticoats and scrape it from their shoes. It's the footman, James Smith who waits
outside the flash manors with the horses and perhaps a beer if the household
remembers - while the Bennet girls
tumble carelessly in their newly washed petticoats into the husband-hunting
fray.
It's
a kind of 'Upstairs Downstairs' sort of thing but primarily downstairs. The upstairs bits remind the reader of what
was happening in Austen's novel, with a new perspective on the characters as
viewed from downstairs. And fascinatingly,
we have a terrific back story to Mr and Mrs Bennet which is simply perfect, and
I bet Jane Austen (if she knew) wished she'd thought of it. Erhem, and somewhat shamelessly I will quote
a character in my own novel 'About turns'... Rachel in the book club who says
that 'Mr Bennet is a typical man. Both
the cause of neurosis and the victim of it.'
Perhaps Jo Baker would agree.
The thing is, I've never truly succumbed to
the hoopla around this most famous of Austen's novels, and perhaps it's the
working class chip on my shoulder. Not
that I've ever slaved in a household washing other people's undies, but I have
emptied chamber pots. What I love about
'Longbourn' is the grittiness, the intimate details of all the things that we
might rather avoid, like the emptying of the chamber pots, the making of soap,
the sheer hard grind of it all. And
although the war and the Militia are on the periphery of Austen's novel, in
Baker's version of events, we go to war in Portugal and Spain, we travel to the Caribbean and see first-hand
the slave-trade-sugar triangle - the politics of one of the flash manors in
Austen's novel.
Yes, it may well have been very important to
find a wealthy husband to provide for the household, but it only runs smoothly
when the housemaids know which ribbons to buy for your shoes, how to scent the
soap made from pig fat, and when to put duty before love, or not..
.
I
remember reviewing 'Death comes to Pemberley' which is P.D.James' homage to
Austen and in this novel, I was even less engaged with Elizabeth and
Darcy. So, it has taken Jo Baker to
reignite my interest in the Bennet household, in the romance of Elizabeth and
Darcy (even though it's been done to death), and then again... you can just
read 'Longbourn' all by itself as a beautifully written and heart-warming
romance and find yourselves a new heroine and hero. A movie, I hear is in the making.
Jolisa Gracewood in her review in
the Listener says this..."It's a smashing novel. Reader, if it were a person, I'd marry
it." Can't say better than that!
About the reviewer:
Maggie Rainey-Smith (right) is a Wellington writer and regular reviewer on Beattie's Book Blog. She is also Chair of the Wellington branch of the NZ Society of Authors.
About the reviewer:
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