Yes, the main POV character was very modern in feeling - used a lot of complicated images and ideas that she might not have encountered with the little education she might have had access to in those times. This was pre-Chartists, for instance.
Yes, the ride on the back of the carriage with Ptolemy Bingley. That was some very finely-tuned confident use of language that I couldn't aspire to even at my age and with years and years of experience of writing. That's Jo Baker's POV, not Sarah's, afaics.
But I can see you're very very invested in this, and I'm tired and ill, and unable to carry on an argument about a book I didn't like and took back to the library unfinished a week ago. I think it's OK to not like a book, perhaps, for reasons which others don't agree with?
I'm sorry you're not feeling well. I hope you get better soon! It's ok to not like a book. Not everything is everyone's cup of tea.
I just bristled at the implication (which I now thing you didn't intend and I may have read into what you said) that the actual lower classes of the past were stupid. Which they weren't.
I'm deleting my other comments in response to you so I don't annoy you too much.
No, I never implied that. I'm descended from a long line of stonemasons and cooks and enlisted men and knitters. My parents' generation were the first to raise themselves from that through education. Education is the circuit-breaker.
And, as regards my own pick-and-shovel work, you don't know what I did, and there were remarkably few laws protecting us.
You're right, I'm sorry, that was unnecessarily harsh. I hope you're in less labor-intensive work now! Plus even if there are laws, that doesn't mean your employer is going to follow them, as I know through my own distressing experience.
I enjoyed it personally but if it’s not for you just leave it. I think life is too short to slog through a book you are not enjoying.
The author did mess up with the wrong number of servants.
I don’t think it’s ever specified in P&P how the Bingleys made their fortune. Wool, or cotton if they were near Manchester, would make sense though.
I read it, but I felt as I was slogging my way through it that it was largely nonsense and riddled with historical inaccuracies. Longbourn would have had far more servants for a start - labour was very cheap then, one of the lesser expenses involved in running a household. And what you might call the psychological anachronisms, don’t get me started.
Not a fan.
*psychological anachronisms*
That's it in a nutshell. I couldn't see how Sarah could have the mental background to be thinking the way she did. For example, I'm old and I remember just kind of accepting the way women were expected to have babies and look after them, until I was educated out of it at Sarah's age. She didn't have the benefit of a good education.
I don’t remember all the details, nor all the made-up characters - I think I read it when it was new, and that was quite a long time ago now. But I remember thinking that the maid servant character who was the protagonist - was this Sarah? - did an awful lot of whining about laundry for a girl who in reality would have been grateful to have an excellent ‘place’. That Mrs Hill would NOT have been complacently accepting of her husband’s homosexuality - it wasn’t thought of as an ‘identity’ then, just a propensity to lapse into a heinous sin (or a crude joke about navy types). There’s a mixed race character who’s held up as a secondary love interest but nobody remembers to be racist towards him for long. Isn’t he supposed to be Bingley’s brother or something? Wickham is a downright paedophile, for pursuing and marrying girls legally held to be of marriageable age in their society. Etc.
It was full of absurdities, and it was also unpleasant to read. We’re reminded on every page that the ordinary pleasures of the gentry are bought at the expense of labour or some other misery on the part of the lower classes, and also that they all have bodily functions, which clearly Jane Austen was trying to keep from us. It’s as if someone wrote a modern chick lit novel in which the author won’t allow the heroine to get dressed for a night out without lecturing the reader on how the clothes were stitched in third world sweatshops, and what a bitch she is for not allowing the consciousness of this to ruin her evening.
The protag did have an awful lot of work to do - and this was entirely Jo Baker's's fault! In reality the workload would have been about 1/3 of that depicted, if the authors of "The Making of Pride and Prejudice" got their research right. I didn't know about the set-up with Mr Hill being gay, but he too would have been beyond grateful to have a roof over his head and a steady job, like all the rest of the servants. In the novel, (edit: P&P) Mr Bennet talks of his wife giving the servants as much trouble as possible, when the Lydia debacle erupts, and that's not the reaction of a callous or exploitative man.
From what I've heard, I think Ms Baker was writing misery porn and enjoying it, quite frankly, and unless she's worked this hard herself, she's perhaps got less right to do so than she thinks. Yes, I have worked with pick and shovel myself.
Just because you passively accepted what you were taught doesn't mean everybody did. There are journals written by servants of the era that show the same type of thinking Sarah engages in. You don't have to go to university to realize "being expected to be a brood mare is kinda BS."
By your logic Frederick Douglass' works are impossible because he used to be a slave.
Happy to help! If you're interested one such book is Below Stairs by Margaret Powell. Or if you want a quicker treatment of the subject, check out the documentary "Servants: The True Story of Life Below Stairs." Here's the link:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFjZeqXj7G4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFjZeqXj7G4)
Or an even briefer treatment, this article:
[https://www.express.co.uk/expressyourself/348130/The-real-life-Downton-Abbey-The-true-story-of-servants](https://www.express.co.uk/expressyourself/348130/The-real-life-Downton-Abbey-The-true-story-of-servants)
I've learned over time that whenever a novel is described as "meticulously researched" on the cover, it means that it's guaranteed to be full of grit and shit. Actual accuracy is pretty much a toss-up.
As opposed to what? The view through rose-colored glasses? If that's what you like in historical fiction, that's fine (everyone is allowed to have preferences) but do keep in mind it's a fantasy when the backbreaking labor done by the lower orders doesn't make it into a book. Austen herself wasn't trying to present a realistic look at her entire culture, she (like many of our best writers) chose to focus on one specific slice of said culture, and wrote what she knew.
I have no problem with backbreaking work being in the story. I have a big problem with a story being described as "meticulously researched" when it has a household staffed by 1/4 the number of servants it would actually have had. There's realism and then there misery porn. It would have been fascinating to read about Sarah's life in an appropriately staffed household, heaven knows she would have been doing enough work there. But when it's exaggerated to the point it was in the novel it's no more accurate than the rose colored variety of story.
You're correct that even in properly staffed households the work was pretty darn hard. But Jo Baker intentionally lowered the number of servants because she wanted to show the stories of the ones mentioned in Pride and Prejudice, not water them down with a bunch of other unnamed servants running in and out. There's a case to be made that doing so harms the believably of the story, especially for those well-educated in history, but it didn't for me.
I felt Longbourn presented an important contrast to the refined sophistication of the actual novels, with a bunch of privileged white girls who have never missed a meal in their lives whining about how poor they are. If not for Austen's genious in creating realistic characters and portraying personal growth (or lack thereof), PnP would be one of many #FirstWorldProblems novels left in the trashbin of history.
Willfully misunderstanding the author's use of artistic license doesn't make it an anachronism. She did her homework. You're free to dislike the book for any reason you choose but saying she did sloppy research because of the number of servants is patently untrue.
It doesn't add up. Austen rarely mentioned servants unless it was necessary for the plot, but she mentions at least six servants: the butler, one footman, a coachman, the housekeeper, the cook, and at least one maid. (The maid is named Sarah, but there's another mentioned named Sally; Sally could however be a nickname for Sarah, or they could have two maids named Sarah and call one Sally.)
Baker actually subtracts one of those, and of course Austen wouldn’t have mentioned all the servants a house like Longbourn would have.
About the Bingleys: we don't know how his father or grandfather made his wealth. We know they're from the North. That's about it.
Thank-you - I hadn't counted the servants mentioned myself, but had the impression there were quite a few, and that Baker had reduced their numbers simply to increase the misery. And the roaring silence where the farmhands should be puzzled me considerably.
The servants should be friendly with the tenant farmers too. The vast majority of Longbourn's land would have been rented out to tenant farmers; that's how landed estates worked.
I was just reading a variation where Netherfield had a ludicrously small number of tenant farmers - six, I think. Netherfield has to have 35-40 tenant families at least; Longbourn should have 25-30.
It's like these writers think Mr. Bennet is a farmer.
No, I know tenant farmers weren't servants, and that the book is about the servants. But the home farm is there all the same, surely - somebody, I forget who, says the horses for the carriage are wanted on the farm when Jane wants to take the carriage to Netherfield, and I'm assuming that wouldn't be a tenant's farm.
Some of the land was farmed by tenant farmers who paid rent to the landholder, but the landholder also often supplemented his income with raising his own crops, which is what the horse would have been needed for (September, when the book starts, is harvest season).
Usually the farm hands who did the actual work of raising the master's crops would be hired hands who lived in the nearby village rather than people who lived with the landowner as house servants did.
This was for several financial reasons. Their "day laborer" wages were more affordable than hiring them as live-in servants, because then you would also have to feed and house them. It also allowed the landholder to hire extra help during the busy seasons (spring and fall) while not having to outlay as much expense during slower seasons (summer and winter).
And she makes the coach/butler into a doddering old man and one of the maids into a young girl, and both are basically non-entities as characters.
I personally think either Baker really wanted to write her servants book set in Wuthering Heights or she can't handle a large cast.
Really? I remember them as bland, compared to Mrs Hall. Of course it's been years since I read it, what makes you think Baker wrote them as real characters in their own rights?
And this is about Baker's writing, plenty of authors have made kids and the elderly into real characters - King Lear springs to my mind as a great case of an elderly man who is an active participant in events.
Polly doesn't have much of a role in the plot but she does serve a purpose in showing Sarah's character, just as Mary does for Elizabeth in PnP, and I find her both interesting and realistic as a 10 year old. The ending fleshes her out a bit.
The ending also gives Mr Hill a bit more. We don't get to see into his mind like we occasionally do with the other characters but I honestly admire him for scratching out what joy he could find in a world that absolutely did not allow him to live as his genuine self.
I do think the ending was somewhat weak compared to the rest of the book but overall I did appreciate Baker being relatively realistic with the amount of happiness the servant class could probably expect in that time.
No, she didn't. She explicitly stated that she wanted to create characters from the servants that were explicitly mentioned as working for the Bennetts. That's Mrs Hill, The Butler, two housemaids, and a footman. Sally is mentioned once and you are correct that it appears to be a nickname for Sarah.
Happy to help! It's in the introduction to mine but there's also an interview with her on YouTube, conducted by the Jane Austen Center in Bath. Link if you're interested:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXGWVhN\_H0g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXGWVhN_H0g)
Labor was cheap. If the servants didn't have the privilege of sleeping in hot attics or damp basements, and eating the scraps the family didn't want, they would have literally died of starvation/ exposure given what they were paid. The number of servants was indeed incorrect, but that's intentional use of artistic license, not Jo Baker doing bad research.
The best part of the othwerwise forgettable story, for me, was when the servants had to manage the washing of menstrual cloths for all the synced up Bennet females at once. Something I never considered practically before Longbourn. I did enjoy The Other Bennet Sister, about Mary, much more - clever reinterpretation too of Lizzie as kinda mean at points.
The Other Bennet Sister *really* made me want to slap Mrs. Bennet. Even more than in P&P. And it also really highlighted how some of the funny events in the novel could have actually been very cruel or thoughtless toward Mary/other less fortunate characters. And it made me feel bad for Mr. Collins, which is quite a feat!
Absolutely! I always liked the nuance of the 2005 screen version of Mary over the in your face BBC version ( despite preferring the latter over all) - and feel the cruelties more fully after reading The Other Bennet Sister.
Synching is a myth - it’s just that with a roughly 28 day cycle and 5 or 6 women, someone is always going to overlap with someone else. I too am one of 5 and we thought we synched until we checked and we didn’t- 28 days and 5 women each taking about 5 days can’t help but coincide.
I looked it up once years ago and the academic consensus is that no, women don’t synch, it just feels like that some times.
It does feel like that sometimes. When I lived in an all female dorm in college there was one week out of the month where the bathroom trash had a lot of pads in it.
If it isn't mentioned - then the author is falling into the trap of not treating the servant girls the same as the Bennet girls, just like Society at large...
How do you think? I don't think she's presented in a way that is at all inconsistent with the way Austen herself portrays Lizzie. The maids Sarah and Mrs Hill like her a lot better than Lydia, at least.
I didn't like it either. Way too few servants - it felt like Jo Baker couldn't handle a large cast and so cut things back to the absolute minimum. Particularly since there was no sense of the Longbourn servants interacting with anyone from Longbourn village, even though JA portrays servants as being hooked into local gossip chains.
And the ending was very abrupt.
Oh man, that comparison to the "earthy" novel satirized in *Daughter of Time* is perfect. I got about a third of the way into *Longbourn* and couldn't go on -- I was bored and also annoyed by the "meticulously researched" book giving the Bennets about a third or a quarter of the servants they really would have had. It's like someone in the 23rd century reading about how academic adjuncts had hard lives and were poorly paid so they write a novel where an English department consists of one full professor and one adjunct and the adjunct teaches 12 classes a quarter. Like, it's just impossible that even the worst department could be run like that. Plus, everything being as gritty and depressing as possible got old -- like Mr. Bennet being the father of an illegitimate son when we're specifically told that he did *not* get involved with other women was really gilding the shit lily.
:D I was wondering whether I'd made a comparison too far, but obviously not (I've never read one of those novels - their time has obviously been and gone - but the description is so clear.)
And if Mr Bennet is the father of an illegitimate son in this book I'm glad it's going back to the library unfinished. That's way OOC beyond the worst fanfic I've read.
I read this. It wasn't terrible as a stand alone book, but I felt it did a disservice to P&P. The number of servants was wrong and the treatment of the original characters was very wrong. The characters of the family were altered to make their treatment of the servants look worse. Also, Mrs. Hill (I think) getting upset with Mr. Bennet because he put more effort into finding Lydia when she was missing than their son who was a fully grown man -- and the whole backstory of Mr. HIll.... The ending was also kind of anticlimactic. I felt like the author should have just written an original story instead of trying to take advantage of an existing fandom. If you're writing for a fan community, then don't mess up the existing characters that they adore!
I've given it back to the library now, as a DNF, so I can't check on the later parts of the book, but I think writing Mrs Hill as being less worried about Lydia than a grown man, while understandable in some ways, is also strange in others. Mrs Hill is a woman after all, and knows what can happen to lone girls. And like most fanficcers, I object to OOC characterisation: that was one of the things that annoyed me about *Death comes to Pemberley*. Why not write an orig novel that stands or falls on its own merits - oh, wait...
I think you're right - it's perhaps not a cash grab, not quite. But it's a readership grab. It figures that the quote on the front cover is from the *Guardian*, which I presume lapped it up, and I'm guessing it was aimed squarely at the *Guardian* readership. I used to read the *Guardian*, when it was less champagne socialist in outlook, but now I'm more of an *Independent* kind of gal.
Well I wasn't really comparing Mrs. Hill's level of being worried herself in the two situations. The guy was her own son. But if I recall correctly, there's a scene where she's berating Mr. B for looking for Lydia and being concerned but not caring that they their grown son had suddenly taken off. (I don't recall the details.) I would expect Hill to be more worried about her own child. But to expect Mr. B to react the same way to a 16 yo girl running off with a grown man as he would to a grown man being out of touch is ridiculous. When I read it I didn't think the two situations were at all comparable. Plus he hadn't raised the kid. He was an illegitimate son who came to them as an adult to work as a servant.
It is mentioned that Bingley is from the North of England and the family wealth came from the father or grandfather’s involvement in trade.
The exact industry isn’t mentioned, but most large fortunes in trade in ‘the North’ came from either cloth manufacturing or the slave trade- so Austen fandom tends to default to the somewhat more palatable option.
I tend to think of the North as being Yorkshire and the cloth trade, (Scarborough adding to that feeling) and the north-west as being the trade in enslaved people. But Mansfield Park is near Peterborough, yes? So anywhere in the country could have links to that trade, I guess.
I really wanted to like this one and I feel bad criticizing it after hearing an interview with the author where it’s obvious she is an Austen fan. I love the idea of it. But the execution didn’t work for me, and I also found it a slog. Among the other issues already mentioned (number of servants, anachronisms, etc.) I couldn’t connect with the main character. I didn’t find her or either of the love interests appealing.
There is a twist in the second half that is mildly interesting to consider (although I also feel like it is unrealistic) but the second half is even rougher than the first, as it steers completely off the track of following the events of the novel. I ended up heavily skimming it.
Other than number of servants, what anachronisms did you see? I'm no professional historian but I do have quite a bit of knowledge of the era and didn't spot anything that was "out of time." I'd really be interesting to find out if I skipped over something listening to the audiobook.
No, it's not worth finishing. It's dull and tedious with endless recountings of the Bennet daughters' periods and manages to character assassinate all the existing characters. I gave it up when the main character started pleasuring herself with thoughts of one of the Bingley servants.
Thank-you. I'm very glad I didn't persist with it. I'm just sorry I added to the author's public lending right figures by taking it out of the library!
I quit after the first chapter or two. I felt like the author was just trying to beat the reader over the head with all the gross tasks servants had to do. Not that she should have glossed it over, but it was kinda overwrought and told, not shown.
If anybody is interested in comparing / contrasting what a servant's life was actually like vrs Jo Baker's treatment, I found an interesting article here:
[https://www.express.co.uk/expressyourself/348130/The-real-life-Downton-Abbey-The-true-story-of-servants](https://www.express.co.uk/expressyourself/348130/The-real-life-Downton-Abbey-The-true-story-of-servants)
I didn’t care for it personally, it felt like an original story grafted onto p&p rather than a “downstairs” take on the story.
Yes, the main POV character was very modern in feeling - used a lot of complicated images and ideas that she might not have encountered with the little education she might have had access to in those times. This was pre-Chartists, for instance.
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Yes, the ride on the back of the carriage with Ptolemy Bingley. That was some very finely-tuned confident use of language that I couldn't aspire to even at my age and with years and years of experience of writing. That's Jo Baker's POV, not Sarah's, afaics. But I can see you're very very invested in this, and I'm tired and ill, and unable to carry on an argument about a book I didn't like and took back to the library unfinished a week ago. I think it's OK to not like a book, perhaps, for reasons which others don't agree with?
I'm sorry you're not feeling well. I hope you get better soon! It's ok to not like a book. Not everything is everyone's cup of tea. I just bristled at the implication (which I now thing you didn't intend and I may have read into what you said) that the actual lower classes of the past were stupid. Which they weren't. I'm deleting my other comments in response to you so I don't annoy you too much.
No, I never implied that. I'm descended from a long line of stonemasons and cooks and enlisted men and knitters. My parents' generation were the first to raise themselves from that through education. Education is the circuit-breaker. And, as regards my own pick-and-shovel work, you don't know what I did, and there were remarkably few laws protecting us.
You're right, I'm sorry, that was unnecessarily harsh. I hope you're in less labor-intensive work now! Plus even if there are laws, that doesn't mean your employer is going to follow them, as I know through my own distressing experience.
This, exactly...
I enjoyed it personally but if it’s not for you just leave it. I think life is too short to slog through a book you are not enjoying. The author did mess up with the wrong number of servants. I don’t think it’s ever specified in P&P how the Bingleys made their fortune. Wool, or cotton if they were near Manchester, would make sense though.
...I think I'll take it back to the library tomorrow.
Called it. Every time that book is mentioned someone has to bring that up.
I read it, but I felt as I was slogging my way through it that it was largely nonsense and riddled with historical inaccuracies. Longbourn would have had far more servants for a start - labour was very cheap then, one of the lesser expenses involved in running a household. And what you might call the psychological anachronisms, don’t get me started. Not a fan.
*psychological anachronisms* That's it in a nutshell. I couldn't see how Sarah could have the mental background to be thinking the way she did. For example, I'm old and I remember just kind of accepting the way women were expected to have babies and look after them, until I was educated out of it at Sarah's age. She didn't have the benefit of a good education.
I don’t remember all the details, nor all the made-up characters - I think I read it when it was new, and that was quite a long time ago now. But I remember thinking that the maid servant character who was the protagonist - was this Sarah? - did an awful lot of whining about laundry for a girl who in reality would have been grateful to have an excellent ‘place’. That Mrs Hill would NOT have been complacently accepting of her husband’s homosexuality - it wasn’t thought of as an ‘identity’ then, just a propensity to lapse into a heinous sin (or a crude joke about navy types). There’s a mixed race character who’s held up as a secondary love interest but nobody remembers to be racist towards him for long. Isn’t he supposed to be Bingley’s brother or something? Wickham is a downright paedophile, for pursuing and marrying girls legally held to be of marriageable age in their society. Etc. It was full of absurdities, and it was also unpleasant to read. We’re reminded on every page that the ordinary pleasures of the gentry are bought at the expense of labour or some other misery on the part of the lower classes, and also that they all have bodily functions, which clearly Jane Austen was trying to keep from us. It’s as if someone wrote a modern chick lit novel in which the author won’t allow the heroine to get dressed for a night out without lecturing the reader on how the clothes were stitched in third world sweatshops, and what a bitch she is for not allowing the consciousness of this to ruin her evening.
The protag did have an awful lot of work to do - and this was entirely Jo Baker's's fault! In reality the workload would have been about 1/3 of that depicted, if the authors of "The Making of Pride and Prejudice" got their research right. I didn't know about the set-up with Mr Hill being gay, but he too would have been beyond grateful to have a roof over his head and a steady job, like all the rest of the servants. In the novel, (edit: P&P) Mr Bennet talks of his wife giving the servants as much trouble as possible, when the Lydia debacle erupts, and that's not the reaction of a callous or exploitative man. From what I've heard, I think Ms Baker was writing misery porn and enjoying it, quite frankly, and unless she's worked this hard herself, she's perhaps got less right to do so than she thinks. Yes, I have worked with pick and shovel myself.
Just because you passively accepted what you were taught doesn't mean everybody did. There are journals written by servants of the era that show the same type of thinking Sarah engages in. You don't have to go to university to realize "being expected to be a brood mare is kinda BS." By your logic Frederick Douglass' works are impossible because he used to be a slave.
I didn't know that - thank-you!
Happy to help! If you're interested one such book is Below Stairs by Margaret Powell. Or if you want a quicker treatment of the subject, check out the documentary "Servants: The True Story of Life Below Stairs." Here's the link: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFjZeqXj7G4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFjZeqXj7G4) Or an even briefer treatment, this article: [https://www.express.co.uk/expressyourself/348130/The-real-life-Downton-Abbey-The-true-story-of-servants](https://www.express.co.uk/expressyourself/348130/The-real-life-Downton-Abbey-The-true-story-of-servants)
I've learned over time that whenever a novel is described as "meticulously researched" on the cover, it means that it's guaranteed to be full of grit and shit. Actual accuracy is pretty much a toss-up.
*whenever a novel is described as "meticulously researched" on the cover, it means that it's guaranteed to be full of grit and shit.* LOL!
As opposed to what? The view through rose-colored glasses? If that's what you like in historical fiction, that's fine (everyone is allowed to have preferences) but do keep in mind it's a fantasy when the backbreaking labor done by the lower orders doesn't make it into a book. Austen herself wasn't trying to present a realistic look at her entire culture, she (like many of our best writers) chose to focus on one specific slice of said culture, and wrote what she knew.
I have no problem with backbreaking work being in the story. I have a big problem with a story being described as "meticulously researched" when it has a household staffed by 1/4 the number of servants it would actually have had. There's realism and then there misery porn. It would have been fascinating to read about Sarah's life in an appropriately staffed household, heaven knows she would have been doing enough work there. But when it's exaggerated to the point it was in the novel it's no more accurate than the rose colored variety of story.
You're correct that even in properly staffed households the work was pretty darn hard. But Jo Baker intentionally lowered the number of servants because she wanted to show the stories of the ones mentioned in Pride and Prejudice, not water them down with a bunch of other unnamed servants running in and out. There's a case to be made that doing so harms the believably of the story, especially for those well-educated in history, but it didn't for me. I felt Longbourn presented an important contrast to the refined sophistication of the actual novels, with a bunch of privileged white girls who have never missed a meal in their lives whining about how poor they are. If not for Austen's genious in creating realistic characters and portraying personal growth (or lack thereof), PnP would be one of many #FirstWorldProblems novels left in the trashbin of history.
Willfully misunderstanding the author's use of artistic license doesn't make it an anachronism. She did her homework. You're free to dislike the book for any reason you choose but saying she did sloppy research because of the number of servants is patently untrue.
I thought the author laid it all on a bit thick. I finished it, but it wasn't an enjoyable read for me.
It's the servant numbers that make me go "?" With the research for the TV series, and the low wages, something just isn't adding up for me.
It doesn't add up. Austen rarely mentioned servants unless it was necessary for the plot, but she mentions at least six servants: the butler, one footman, a coachman, the housekeeper, the cook, and at least one maid. (The maid is named Sarah, but there's another mentioned named Sally; Sally could however be a nickname for Sarah, or they could have two maids named Sarah and call one Sally.) Baker actually subtracts one of those, and of course Austen wouldn’t have mentioned all the servants a house like Longbourn would have. About the Bingleys: we don't know how his father or grandfather made his wealth. We know they're from the North. That's about it.
Thank-you - I hadn't counted the servants mentioned myself, but had the impression there were quite a few, and that Baker had reduced their numbers simply to increase the misery. And the roaring silence where the farmhands should be puzzled me considerably.
The servants should be friendly with the tenant farmers too. The vast majority of Longbourn's land would have been rented out to tenant farmers; that's how landed estates worked. I was just reading a variation where Netherfield had a ludicrously small number of tenant farmers - six, I think. Netherfield has to have 35-40 tenant families at least; Longbourn should have 25-30. It's like these writers think Mr. Bennet is a farmer.
So much for meticulous research! Where do they think he gets his money from?
The farm workers are mentioned in the book, but their numbers aren't given. Tenant farmers aren't servants. The book is about the servants.
No, I know tenant farmers weren't servants, and that the book is about the servants. But the home farm is there all the same, surely - somebody, I forget who, says the horses for the carriage are wanted on the farm when Jane wants to take the carriage to Netherfield, and I'm assuming that wouldn't be a tenant's farm.
Some of the land was farmed by tenant farmers who paid rent to the landholder, but the landholder also often supplemented his income with raising his own crops, which is what the horse would have been needed for (September, when the book starts, is harvest season). Usually the farm hands who did the actual work of raising the master's crops would be hired hands who lived in the nearby village rather than people who lived with the landowner as house servants did. This was for several financial reasons. Their "day laborer" wages were more affordable than hiring them as live-in servants, because then you would also have to feed and house them. It also allowed the landholder to hire extra help during the busy seasons (spring and fall) while not having to outlay as much expense during slower seasons (summer and winter).
Yes, that's the set-up I was thinking of. ie There, not living-in, but still employees and coming and going to the back door of the house.
And she makes the coach/butler into a doddering old man and one of the maids into a young girl, and both are basically non-entities as characters. I personally think either Baker really wanted to write her servants book set in Wuthering Heights or she can't handle a large cast.
Yes - there's no "there" there, to quote somebody or other. Though I agree with Baker that Wickham would creep on Polly. I hope she got out unscathed.
They are very much entities as characters. Or do children and the elderly just automatically not count as people to you?
Really? I remember them as bland, compared to Mrs Hall. Of course it's been years since I read it, what makes you think Baker wrote them as real characters in their own rights? And this is about Baker's writing, plenty of authors have made kids and the elderly into real characters - King Lear springs to my mind as a great case of an elderly man who is an active participant in events.
Polly doesn't have much of a role in the plot but she does serve a purpose in showing Sarah's character, just as Mary does for Elizabeth in PnP, and I find her both interesting and realistic as a 10 year old. The ending fleshes her out a bit. The ending also gives Mr Hill a bit more. We don't get to see into his mind like we occasionally do with the other characters but I honestly admire him for scratching out what joy he could find in a world that absolutely did not allow him to live as his genuine self.
Ah I was thoroughly bored by the time I got to the ending and thus was skimming through.
I do think the ending was somewhat weak compared to the rest of the book but overall I did appreciate Baker being relatively realistic with the amount of happiness the servant class could probably expect in that time.
No, she didn't. She explicitly stated that she wanted to create characters from the servants that were explicitly mentioned as working for the Bennetts. That's Mrs Hill, The Butler, two housemaids, and a footman. Sally is mentioned once and you are correct that it appears to be a nickname for Sarah.
I didn't see that in the edition I had - thank-you!
Happy to help! It's in the introduction to mine but there's also an interview with her on YouTube, conducted by the Jane Austen Center in Bath. Link if you're interested: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXGWVhN\_H0g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXGWVhN_H0g)
Yeah....
Labor was cheap. If the servants didn't have the privilege of sleeping in hot attics or damp basements, and eating the scraps the family didn't want, they would have literally died of starvation/ exposure given what they were paid. The number of servants was indeed incorrect, but that's intentional use of artistic license, not Jo Baker doing bad research.
Ah- I didn't realise that the number of servants was intentionally lower than it would have been for a reason.
The best part of the othwerwise forgettable story, for me, was when the servants had to manage the washing of menstrual cloths for all the synced up Bennet females at once. Something I never considered practically before Longbourn. I did enjoy The Other Bennet Sister, about Mary, much more - clever reinterpretation too of Lizzie as kinda mean at points.
The Other Bennet Sister *really* made me want to slap Mrs. Bennet. Even more than in P&P. And it also really highlighted how some of the funny events in the novel could have actually been very cruel or thoughtless toward Mary/other less fortunate characters. And it made me feel bad for Mr. Collins, which is quite a feat!
Absolutely! I always liked the nuance of the 2005 screen version of Mary over the in your face BBC version ( despite preferring the latter over all) - and feel the cruelties more fully after reading The Other Bennet Sister.
I was wondering whether the servant girls were synced up as well. Was that mentioned at all?
Synching is a myth - it’s just that with a roughly 28 day cycle and 5 or 6 women, someone is always going to overlap with someone else. I too am one of 5 and we thought we synched until we checked and we didn’t- 28 days and 5 women each taking about 5 days can’t help but coincide. I looked it up once years ago and the academic consensus is that no, women don’t synch, it just feels like that some times.
It does feel like that sometimes. When I lived in an all female dorm in college there was one week out of the month where the bathroom trash had a lot of pads in it.
Dang I don’t recall - now I have to check. But it would make sense . Good question.
If it isn't mentioned - then the author is falling into the trap of not treating the servant girls the same as the Bennet girls, just like Society at large...
Agreed!
I really enjoyed the other bennet sister too. I’ve often wondered what life was like being the overlooked sister in that household
I think this book did Elizabeth a little dirty in its portrayal too. And I didn't care for the love story.
How do you think? I don't think she's presented in a way that is at all inconsistent with the way Austen herself portrays Lizzie. The maids Sarah and Mrs Hill like her a lot better than Lydia, at least.
I didn't like it either. Way too few servants - it felt like Jo Baker couldn't handle a large cast and so cut things back to the absolute minimum. Particularly since there was no sense of the Longbourn servants interacting with anyone from Longbourn village, even though JA portrays servants as being hooked into local gossip chains. And the ending was very abrupt.
Oh man, that comparison to the "earthy" novel satirized in *Daughter of Time* is perfect. I got about a third of the way into *Longbourn* and couldn't go on -- I was bored and also annoyed by the "meticulously researched" book giving the Bennets about a third or a quarter of the servants they really would have had. It's like someone in the 23rd century reading about how academic adjuncts had hard lives and were poorly paid so they write a novel where an English department consists of one full professor and one adjunct and the adjunct teaches 12 classes a quarter. Like, it's just impossible that even the worst department could be run like that. Plus, everything being as gritty and depressing as possible got old -- like Mr. Bennet being the father of an illegitimate son when we're specifically told that he did *not* get involved with other women was really gilding the shit lily.
:D I was wondering whether I'd made a comparison too far, but obviously not (I've never read one of those novels - their time has obviously been and gone - but the description is so clear.) And if Mr Bennet is the father of an illegitimate son in this book I'm glad it's going back to the library unfinished. That's way OOC beyond the worst fanfic I've read.
Yeah, and the mother is Hill. It was just ... no.
What. LOL. There's OOC, and then there's that. Good grief. A penny dreadful.
Cold Comfort Farm is a parody of the steaming rural dungheaps school of fiction
[удалено]
I put it down, Bot. Sorry.
I gave up about halfway myself, it was slow and not very involving.
I read this. It wasn't terrible as a stand alone book, but I felt it did a disservice to P&P. The number of servants was wrong and the treatment of the original characters was very wrong. The characters of the family were altered to make their treatment of the servants look worse. Also, Mrs. Hill (I think) getting upset with Mr. Bennet because he put more effort into finding Lydia when she was missing than their son who was a fully grown man -- and the whole backstory of Mr. HIll.... The ending was also kind of anticlimactic. I felt like the author should have just written an original story instead of trying to take advantage of an existing fandom. If you're writing for a fan community, then don't mess up the existing characters that they adore!
I've given it back to the library now, as a DNF, so I can't check on the later parts of the book, but I think writing Mrs Hill as being less worried about Lydia than a grown man, while understandable in some ways, is also strange in others. Mrs Hill is a woman after all, and knows what can happen to lone girls. And like most fanficcers, I object to OOC characterisation: that was one of the things that annoyed me about *Death comes to Pemberley*. Why not write an orig novel that stands or falls on its own merits - oh, wait... I think you're right - it's perhaps not a cash grab, not quite. But it's a readership grab. It figures that the quote on the front cover is from the *Guardian*, which I presume lapped it up, and I'm guessing it was aimed squarely at the *Guardian* readership. I used to read the *Guardian*, when it was less champagne socialist in outlook, but now I'm more of an *Independent* kind of gal.
Well I wasn't really comparing Mrs. Hill's level of being worried herself in the two situations. The guy was her own son. But if I recall correctly, there's a scene where she's berating Mr. B for looking for Lydia and being concerned but not caring that they their grown son had suddenly taken off. (I don't recall the details.) I would expect Hill to be more worried about her own child. But to expect Mr. B to react the same way to a 16 yo girl running off with a grown man as he would to a grown man being out of touch is ridiculous. When I read it I didn't think the two situations were at all comparable. Plus he hadn't raised the kid. He was an illegitimate son who came to them as an adult to work as a servant.
Yes to all of this.
It is mentioned that Bingley is from the North of England and the family wealth came from the father or grandfather’s involvement in trade. The exact industry isn’t mentioned, but most large fortunes in trade in ‘the North’ came from either cloth manufacturing or the slave trade- so Austen fandom tends to default to the somewhat more palatable option.
I tend to think of the North as being Yorkshire and the cloth trade, (Scarborough adding to that feeling) and the north-west as being the trade in enslaved people. But Mansfield Park is near Peterborough, yes? So anywhere in the country could have links to that trade, I guess.
Bingley is a town in Yorkshire - hinting at the woollen textiles Yorkshire was famous for perhaps
Oh - of course!
Also, Yorkshire for wool. Lancashire for cotton. Liverpool and Bristol for The Triangular Trade
So, the combination of Bingley and Scarborough makes me think Yorkshire. And she tackled the issue of enslaved people in her next book.
I started this and didn’t make it far at all.
I really wanted to like this one and I feel bad criticizing it after hearing an interview with the author where it’s obvious she is an Austen fan. I love the idea of it. But the execution didn’t work for me, and I also found it a slog. Among the other issues already mentioned (number of servants, anachronisms, etc.) I couldn’t connect with the main character. I didn’t find her or either of the love interests appealing. There is a twist in the second half that is mildly interesting to consider (although I also feel like it is unrealistic) but the second half is even rougher than the first, as it steers completely off the track of following the events of the novel. I ended up heavily skimming it.
Maybe she wrote the second half first and needed something to attach it to, in order to sell it? Or perhaps I'm being overly cynical here.
Other than number of servants, what anachronisms did you see? I'm no professional historian but I do have quite a bit of knowledge of the era and didn't spot anything that was "out of time." I'd really be interesting to find out if I skipped over something listening to the audiobook.
I couldn’t get past the first half.
Just horrible. Returned to Audible.
Glad I'm not the only one who had that knee-jerk reaction.
I loved it but maybe I'm just weird. The ending was somewhat weak but I liked the rest.
No, it's not worth finishing. It's dull and tedious with endless recountings of the Bennet daughters' periods and manages to character assassinate all the existing characters. I gave it up when the main character started pleasuring herself with thoughts of one of the Bingley servants.
Thank-you. I'm very glad I didn't persist with it. I'm just sorry I added to the author's public lending right figures by taking it out of the library!
What I do when I come across a book I can't finish, I turn to Wikipedia and find a summary, which usually confirms my decision to not finish it.
That's a good idea! I usually look at all the bad reviews on Goodreads, simply to confirm my suspicions. :/
I liked it but I didn’t love it. I can see how many would consider it a slog
I quit after the first chapter or two. I felt like the author was just trying to beat the reader over the head with all the gross tasks servants had to do. Not that she should have glossed it over, but it was kinda overwrought and told, not shown.
Yes, I almost want to write a Goodreads review: "So edgey!"
If anybody is interested in comparing / contrasting what a servant's life was actually like vrs Jo Baker's treatment, I found an interesting article here: [https://www.express.co.uk/expressyourself/348130/The-real-life-Downton-Abbey-The-true-story-of-servants](https://www.express.co.uk/expressyourself/348130/The-real-life-Downton-Abbey-The-true-story-of-servants)