Book Review: Longbourn

I cannot recall if I read much Jane Austen in my earlier years. Did I read Pride and Prejudice as a teen, perhaps for my Individualized Reading course in my senior year? As an adult, I'm not drawn to Austen's books, however that may have changed. After listening to the audio version of Jo Baker's Longbourn, a flip-side of the Pride and Prejudice story, treating the lives of the servants in the household, I am more eager to tackle Austen's original works. I discovered available audio versions of both Pride and Prejudice and the recent modernized version, Eligible, by Curtis Sittenfeld. After a lengthy spate without adequate audio options, I'm quite thrilled.

Longbourn begins with an introduction to an orphaned servant girl, Sarah, who works as a housemaid for the Bennet family. She and another housemaid, Polly, strip their hands to the bones working with the pig slop, the laundry, and the dishes. Governed by the austere Mrs. Hill, the world the girls inhabit is small and predictable. Life, as they know it, shifts irreversibly when a new footman arrives to share their load.

The writing was lyrical and true. I loved this beautiful passage rendering the disguised birth of the master's illegitimate child:

"In the witching hour of a winter night, she brought forth a tiny scrap of a boy who opened blue-black eyes and studied her with a sleepy wisdom, and whose suckling was a dragging ache in her breast, and whose tiny ruddy fists kneaded at her as though he was quite deliberately reshaping her and making her into someone altogether new. What had hitherto seemed to be a problem to be solved, was now revealed to be the answer. The very fact of the child made everything that had gone before shift and ripple and settle differently because it all now led to this, and him, and he was as perfect as a syllabub or a pillowcase, straight off the line. This could not be dealt with reasonably; reason had nothing to do with it."

It explains how she grieved as she handed over her child. To save the master's reputation, someone else would feed and raise the boy. The intensity of emotion, the craft of wording, the transformation a child brings into a mother's life... it all moved me beyond measure. The characters and historical setting came to life.

I much prefer the British cover, shown left. If you are a fan of Austen's Pride and Prejudice, you will enjoy this alternate tale of what goes on behind the scenes. The lives of the servants might not be as glamorous as the lives of the Bennet sisters, but their need for love and a place in the world is just as intense. Sarah must root through her options and decide what she wants from life. Should she return the interests of Ptolemy Bingley, a servant on a neighboring estate, or will she find love right there at Longbourn? Will she cast aside her only known source of employment to chase after love? Or will she deaden her desires and settle for the stability of hard work? Both upstairs and downstairs, security is a constant craving.