This is what Sarah had always wanted: something — anything — to disturb the quiet, to distract her from the sounds of Mr. Hill’s revolving mastication, and the prospect of another spiritless evening, and the monotony of her own voice reading three-decker novels and three-day-old news. But now change had come to Longbourn, and Polly was staring at it as if she were a simpleton, and Mrs. Hill kept topping up its glass, and even Mr. Hill was smiling and glancing at it and then shyly away, and Sarah was left heartsunk and ignored, and wishing that this change, with its dark hair and hazel eyes, and its skin the colour of tea, had never come to Longbourn at all.
I purchased Longbourn and Pride and Prejudice at the same time, planning from the start to read the one after the other to see how well they chimed together. (I had had a really positive experience with author Jo Baker before, immensely enjoying A Country Road, A Tree in concert with Waiting for Godot.) But as much as I was interested in this premise — revisiting the events of Pride and Prejudice from the perspective of the Bennets’ servants — it really didn’t pay off for me: I don’t think that Baker was true to Austen’s characters, there was entirely too much bosom-heaving romance and melodrama, and any social commentary jarred as anachronistic. I would give this two and a half stars and am only rounding up because Baker does write nice sentences.
Sarah landed hard on the stone flags. Her nose confirmed what she had already guessed: she had slipped in hogshit. The sow had got out yesterday, and all her piglets skittering after her, and nobody had cleared up after them yet; nobody had the time. Each day’s work trickled over into the next, and nothing was ever finished, so you could never say, Look, that’s it, the day’s labour is over and done. Work just lingered and festered and lay in wait, to make you slip up in the morning.
With a narrative centering primarily on the young housemaid, Sarah, there is no end to the work this small staff must suffer in order to support the family of seven living upstairs. It was semi-interesting (“semi” because it was not more than I could have imagined) to see how much behind-the-scenes work went into the meals and clothing and errands as described by Austen — as Baker writes in an Author’s Note at the end, “When the Bennet girls enter a ball in Austen’s novel, they leave the carriage waiting in this one” — and based on one small detail from P & P (a footman, only mentioned once, who delivers a note to Jane), Baker chooses to show a handsome young man joining the staff belowstairs and shaking things up. Not only does the appearance of James Smith set up a will-they-won’t-they romance between James and Sarah, but his presence reveals a (predictable and not very satisfying) domestic twist, and allows Baker to write gritty flashback scenes for his time as a soldier in the Napoleonic Wars. All very dramatic and little to do with Austen’s novel.
As for Baker’s treatment of Austen’s characters: I truly did not recognise them here. Mr. Collins is not a terrible blowhard and he disappears into happiness with his new wife, Charlotte, despite the housekeeper’s best efforts to get him to notice the heartbroken, red-eyed Mary. Mrs. Bennet is doped up for her nerves, and Mr. Bennet not only doesn’t get any snappy lines, but he’s frail and old before his time, only consoled by the housekeeper’s gentle hand. Mr. Bingley is given a Black footman so that Baker can explain the “triangular trade” to us (in her version, the Bingley wealth comes from sugar: the elder Bingley trading British iron goods for African slaves who were then sent to his Caribbean plantations, where sugar was collected to bring back to England; this footman, Ptolemy, being a freed slave brought to England in the Bingley employ), and it would, apparently, not have been scandalous for Sarah to have married Ptolemy if she couldn’t have James. There’s a marriage of convenience between a sexually active gay man and a heavy-hearted woman; Wickham has creepy intentions towards an underage maid (which is echoed in the flashbacks by James’ Sergeant trading crusts of bread for sex with starving young maidens in wartorn Spain; perhaps that was just the way it was with gentlemen soldiers); Jane and Elizabeth are said to be lovely young women but neither is capable of regarding or treating Sarah as an actual human being. This probably would have worked better for me if it had been just some random servants’ stories, but it was still a whole lotta drama.
Life was, Mrs. Hill had come to understand, a trial by endurance, which everybody, eventually, failed.
In the end, I didn’t buy the freedom that the servants appeared to have to change their lives — Sarah chose to tramp off into unknowable danger to chase a rumour of James rather than stay at the cushiest job she’s ever had or throw her lot in with Ptolemy; Mrs. Hill can sit with Mr. Bennet in his library as he drinks wine and eats cake and not think she would have liked life better as Mrs. Bennet; could an orphan housemaid like Polly actually train to become a teacher, and be encouraged in it, while working dawn til midnight? — they seemed to have believed more in social mobility and the insignificance of class distinctions than feels true to the period. Ultimately, I didn’t really find Longbourn to be credible or to chime much with Pride and Prejudice; Baker does write lovely sentences though.
