Longbourn

By: Jo Baker

Narrated by: Emma Fielding

• Pride and Prejudice was only half the story •

If Elizabeth Bennet had the washing of her own petticoats, Sarah often thought, she’d most likely be a sight more careful with them.

In this irresistibly imagined belowstairs answer to Pride and Prejudice, the servants take center stage. Sarah, the orphaned housemaid, spends her days scrubbing the laundry, polishing the floors, and emptying the chamber pots for the Bennet household. But there is just as much romance, heartbreak, and intrigue downstairs at Longbourn as there is upstairs. When a mysterious new footman arrives, the orderly realm of the servants’ hall threatens to be completely, perhaps irrevocably, upended.

Jo Baker dares to take us beyond the drawing rooms of Jane Austen’s classic—into the often overlooked domain of the stern housekeeper and the starry-eyed kitchen maid, into the gritty daily particulars faced by the lower classes in Regency England during the Napoleonic Wars—and, in doing so, creates a vivid, fascinating, fully realized world that is wholly her own.

Very well done

What made the experience of listening to Longbourn the most enjoyable?

I thought this book might be superficial but it is anything but. Very convincing detail and well thought out.

Fantastic!

I highly recommend this book. Incredibly well written. Makes Jane Austin's characters pale in comparison to the servants.

Bad ending

Well written engaging book, but bad ending. Without giving the ending away it was too brief and highly improbable. So disappointed. Cannot recommend on the ending alone. It’s like the author ran out of ink.

feels a bit like fan fiction

it just feels like someone wanted to get even with the original characters. it has some merits but the descriptions feel to filmic, like the author is imaging a camera shot sometimes, and those shots don't get across very well.

Is there any society more tedious than the English

Sorry, maybe it's too much Downton Abbey or Jane Austin, but the lifestyle, values, priorities of the English of this era become so tedious and frivolous that I looked forward to the end of this well narrated book.