We eventually find out that James served as a soldier in the Napoleonic Wars, witnessing horrifying episodes of violence and starvation. In Pride and Prejudice, soldiers are merely dashing extras who entertain the Bennet sisters the dim-witted Lydia Bennet even shares as flighty gossip the fact that "a private had been flogged." In Longbourn, Sarah witnesses that whipping in all its horrific detail. James, you see, is a man with a past, and it's here that Baker's novel takes its most fascinating turn. While Ptolemy flirts with Sarah, James stews over his feelings and whether he can risk showing his feelings to her. He's also the mixed-race son of one of the family's slaves abroad, and it's implied he shares the same father as Charles. Just as he begins to capture Sarah's attention, a rival comes into the picture: Ptolemy Bingley is a handsome footman to Jane Bennet's suitor Charles Bingley. The boredom, though, is interrupted when a new footman, James Smith, arrives. Imaginary places: Longbourn (residence of the Bennets), Netherfield Park. Sarah scrubs out the Bennet girls' dirty underwear and petticoats, she slops through rain and mud for bows for their shoes, and she slips and falls in hog manure. This document includes a list of places in the novel Pride and Prejudice. While it's clear that being a maid has saved her from utter destitution, it's a life that's also dirty, tiring and boring.
In Longbourn, the focus is on Sarah, an orphan and a housemaid to the Bennet girls. It develops the kind of fictional contrast between classes found in such popular television series as Upstairs, Downstairs and, of course, the current hit Downton Abbey.
Longbourn, by Jo Baker, tells the story of Pride and Prejudice from the point of view of the servants who wait on the Bennet family at their titular ancestral home.
A recent entry, though, is worth the time of Pride and Prejudice fans, as well as anyone who enjoys historical fiction.
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