Book #65: Longbourn by Jo Baker

Yet another Jane Austen-related read! I heard about this in several places and was super interested. Longbourn is a look at Pride and Prejudice from the servants' perspective, but that really over-simplifies the scope of this book. Really, the story we know and love from P&P is only the bare bones of this story, the setting, while a completely individual story goes on in the downstairs section of the Bennet household. We meet a cast of characters that are mostly unnamed and unimportant in the original story--Mrs. Hill, the only servant named in the original story; Sarah, the housemaid; Polly, her younger assistant; Mr. Hill; and James, a new footman recently hired at Longbourn. Although we never hear anything about them or what they do in the original story, they have actual thoughts and lives and interesting histories, and it's really neat to see how the story plays out and how the actions of the Bennet family are received and taken by the servant class. Mostly, the servants are interested in what's going on upstairs by how it will affect them and their workloads; Elizabeth deciding to walk the three miles to Netherfield through the fields is no longer a charming independent gesture but one that will cause hours of soaking and laundering and scraping to clean her boots and petticoats. It's obvious how inconsiderate and rude it was of Mr. Bennet to invite Mr. Collins there to stay without any prior announcement of his coming, considering the work it takes for the servants to get the room/house ready for visitors. But they have their own lives and interests too; Sarah, the main voice and character for the story, is dying to get out and see the world but little aware of how innocent and naive she is. She (eventually, in her own "pride and prejudice" romantic twist) has her own love story and gets to learn a little more about the world and life by traveling a little, and we learn a little about the Bennet sisters' drama along with her own.

I loved this look at the P&P story. I thought it was a good reminder that there are so many people and points of view who are basically ignored throughout the original story (and throughout history, obviously). It's funny how in this story, you can see how Lizzie and Jane are nice to the servants but also basically ignore them and don't think about things from their points of view at all. (For example: it's raining buckets one day and Lizzie and Lydia decide they need new decorations for their shoes, but it's raining too hard for them to walk into town, so they just decide Sarah can do it for them. So she has to walk into town and get completely soaked, just for these random "shoe-roses.") So this book is not just a P&P rewrite; it's a completely individual story that's set in the exact same place, and it was really, really good.

P.S. I don't feel like I've read that much this month, but I still made it through 10 books! I've already read more books this year than I did in all of last year. So far, 2/3 of the way through this year, I'm (ALMOST) 2/3 of the way through the goal of 100 books this year. I've never read that many in the last three years I've been keeping track, but maybe I will this year! We'll see.