Longbourn is a novel written by Jo Baker, that reimagines the world of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice from the perspective of the household’s servants.
Rather than focusing on the familiar tale of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy, this novel follows the lives of the people working below stairs at Longbourn.
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Book Blurb
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 centre 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 realised world that is wholly her own.
About the author
Jo Baker is a British author known for both historical and contemporary fiction. Before becoming a full-time novelist, Baker studied at Oxford University and Queen’s University Belfast, and she has worked in both publishing and academia.
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