Book Review - 'Longbourn' by Jo Baker

This is my first experience of Jo Baker’s writing. I’d read an article about her a couple of months ago, which mentioned this novel, a reimagining of ‘Pride and Prejudice’ from the servants’ point of view. And I was intrigued.
‘It is wash-day for the housemaids at Longbourn House, and Sarah’s hands are chapped and raw. Domestic life below stairs, ruled with a tender heart and an iron will by Mrs Hill the housekeeper, is about to be disturbed by the arrival of a new footman, bearing secrets and the scent of the sea.’

The one quote that’s often repeated with this book is from the main character, Sarah – ‘If Elizabeth Bennet had the washing of her own petticoats,’ Sarah thought, ‘she would be more careful not to tramp through muddy fields.’

‘Pride and Prejudice’ is one of my favourite books and I’ve always liked the character of Elizabeth Bennet. I’ve only now realised – it’s probably because she reminds me of Jo in ‘Little Women’.

Elizabeth’s propensity to go tramping through fields, muddy or not, is one of the images from the story that sticks in my mind. But never once did it occur to me that some poor soul has to wash her muddied petticoats and get them as white as they possibly can.

This story made me stop and think of the other side to the familiar story and characters of ‘Pride and Prejudice’, the other side of what’s generally seen as Elizabeth’s carefree nature; the characters who usually blend into the background.

The main character, as I’ve said, is Sarah. I think she’s in her late teens, and is the older of two housemaids, and we meet her right at the beginning. Then there’s Mrs Hill, the housekeeper and her husband, Mr Hill, the butler. The youngest of the servants is Polly, and she’s about twelve, I think.

Not much time is spent describing the Bennets because we already know them. Here, we see them in a new light, through the eyes of the servants.

By the second chapter, we meet the new footman, James Smith, who seems to have sprung up out of nowhere. A young man, he keeps himself to himself but is a good worker and the others are happy to have him around.

Except for Sarah. She decides she doesn’t like him and the mystery surrounding his life before coming Longbourn. She watches his every move, either waiting for him to slip up or to glimpse some clue to his past.

Another character that’s introduced is Ptolemy, who had been a slave but is now a footman in the Bingley household.

All the other characters from ‘Pride and Prejudice’ are present. Apart from the Bennets and Mr Collins, we only catch glances, sometimes just hints, of the others.

It becomes obvious very quickly that Jo Baker has done her research with regards to what life was like for the servant class in the 1800s. We’re left in no doubt that their life was hard and unpleasant.
‘The air was sharp at four thirty in the morning, when she started work. The iron pump-handle was cold, and even with her mitts on, her chilblains flared as she heaved the water up from the underground dark and into her waiting pail. A long day to be got through, and this just the very start of it.’

I enjoyed the first part – the book is divided into three parts – and a large part of that is down to Baker’s prose. Her descriptions are eloquent and lovely.
‘[Sarah]… ducked out into the peppery-cold morning. Pulling on the coat… she strode out of the yard and across the paddock, the frosted grass crunching and the rime kicking back up over her toecaps. She slipped through the side gate and turned up the lane; birds hopped and peeped in the hedgerows. She ducked into blue-black woods, and then back out into the starry morning. The sleeves hung low over her hands; she tugged up the collar and dipped her face into it; the old velvet smelt musty.’

I find the imagery this passage conjures, vivid:
‘Sarah, though, could still summon her ghosts, blurred with summer sun and dim with shadow: chickens scuffing at the cottage door beside a little boy… of the woman in a red dress who had whisked her off her feet and kissed her; of a man who sat indoors over a shuddering loom, a book balanced on the frame, and got up from his seat so stiffly in the dark; of lying in her box bed, her brother curled warm and damp beside her, listening to her parents’ voices in the night, weaving back and forth, holding the whole world together.’

For me, this is Baker’s strength. Even then, there were times I found the descriptions, especially in the second half of the book, too full of detail. It felt as if she didn’t want to waste all the research she’d done and included as much as she could.

Like making soap – it starts with the lye being measured into the water, the melting of the fat all the way through to the soap being “poured into the mould, the mould wrapped around with cloths, and the bundle hidden in a cupboard to continue cooking on its own.” All this made the book much longer than it needed to be.

Once I got into the second part, the story began to bore me. At the end of the day, the story Baker has written is a personal, little story. There isn’t enough to fill a 400-odd page novel. Especially as I found her characters, for the most part – and I hate to say this – dull. They lacked personality.

The only one who stood out for me was the Bingley’s footman, Ptolemy. Even though it was obvious how the relationships would play out, I was hoping Baker would surprise me and take things in an unexpected direction.

Baker focuses a great deal on the realities of life – mud, manure, menstruation – things Austen didn’t write about. It could be argued that this redresses a supposed imbalance in Austen’s stories. It could also be argued she chose not to focus on that as her original audience would have been experiencing those very things; that would have been their reality. And, in the same way we read to escape reality, surely her readers must have been the same.

The incessant gloom and doom surrounding the servants’ lives became too much. Surely there must have been some happiness, some high points they enjoyed. But we don’t get to see any of that. Instead, their lives are shown to be nothing but slogging from one day to the next… Speaking candidly, there’s only so much in-depth drudgery one can take.

The story’s main focus is Sarah. Except for when it isn’t. There are sections where the focus is entirely on the Bennets, which I didn’t see the point of; we already know their story. But Baker gives it a slightly different slant to make it fit in with her plot points.

Which, somehow, leads to the loss of Mr Bennet’s sarcastic humour and dry wit. Yes, I know, at the end of the day, he’s quite a weak parent, preferring to withdraw from his family than deal with any problems that arise. But I enjoy his character. Baker’s version, for me, is a poor copy.

Back to Sarah. I have no idea how servants viewed their lives in the 1800s, but I’m sure they would have, for the most part, been resigned to/accepting of their station in life. Sarah seems to have a touch of a modern miss about her; she’s very self-aware:
‘… she thought… no one should have to deal with another person’s dirty linen. The young ladies might behave like they were smooth and sealed as alabaster statues underneath their clothes, but then they would drop their soiled shifts on the bedchamber floor… and would thus reveal themselves to be the frail, leaking… creatures that they really were. Perhaps… that was why they just couldn’t look her in the eye.’

The romance – yes, there is a romance – is a rather bloodless affair. To be honest, I could see it coming a mile off. And when it arrived, it was so lacklustre it might as well not have been there.

Just past the midway point, there’s a shift back to an earlier time, which ends up transporting us to the war in Spain. This particular backstory is needed, but this was basically an info-dump dressed up as a flashback. And I found it boring, probably because I’d already figured out the mystery.

In case you think I’m some kind of genius, let me tell you, it usually takes me some time to work mysteries out. The only thing that surprised me while reading this was how quickly I saw through it.

Back in the ‘present’ time of the story, I realised I was starting to skim-read – never a good sign. I just wanted to get to the end. But there was so much extraneous description… The depiction of arriving in London for the first time was one long sentence which took up half a page.

Until we got to the last three chapters. And suddenly things sped up, literally hurtling towards the end. Going from one extreme to the other made for a very unsatisfying, convenient ending.

At the end of the day, the thing I minded most about the way this story was told was how the Bennets were portrayed. In fact, how the rich in general were portrayed. They came across as clueless and silly, thoughtless somehow for making work for the servants. Whatever failings they had were put forward in such a way as to make the servants ‘look good’ and appear to be better than rich folk.

Tying this story to ‘Pride and Prejudice’ meant some liberties had to be taken with Austen’s characters. Even though, in the author’s note, Baker states she has “interfered only so far as to give names to the unnamed – the butler, footman, and the second housemaid”, a very big interference had to be made for the sake of a central plot point.

Maybe, I might have enjoyed the story more – maybe – if it had been its own story, not one piggybacking on an existing, much-loved novel. It could have been presented as its own life-below-stairs story set in the same time.

Despite not enjoying this book, I’m still going to read Jo Baker’s other books as I do like her prose. I’m fairly confident I’ll prefer her original stories.