Jo Baker's Longbourn: Or, Why You'll Never Feel the Same about Lizzie's Walk to Netherfield

Some of the most successful adaptations of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice have completely re-imagined the story and shown how it's relevant to a modern protagonist or set of circumstances. These adaptations--like Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary or Pemberley Digital's amazing web series, The Lizzie Bennet Diaries--don't try to mimic Austen's style, but use the plot and characters as a starting point to tell their own story. Less success adaptations, on the other hand, try too hard to stay "true" to Austen's voice and narrative and don't add anything new.

That's one of the reasons why I didn't enjoy P.D. James's Death Comes to Pemberley: James's writing felt uncharacteristically clumsy because she was trying so hard to sound like Austen, and she didn't seem to have anything to add. I finished that novel wondering why on earth James had felt she needed to write a sequel.

There's no question, on the other hand, about Jo Baker's Longbourn: it is an inspired re-imagining of P&P from the servants' point of view, and it tells its own story in its own voice. By telling the story from the servants' perspective, Baker gives a dispassionate view of the narrative: the servants are not swept up in the agonies of the romance, but rather focused on the amount of work that it produces. For example, after an opening sequence that illuminates the drudgery and physical discomfort of doing laundry by hand with harsh lye soaps, Lizzie's walk to Netherfield in the mud to check on Jane becomes less of an act of admirable disregard for convention than a heedless act that someone else will have to clean up after. I, for one, won't be able to read about all those walks to Meryton and elsewhere again without thinking of the servants' chapped hands.

Other aspects of the narrative look different through the servants' perspective, as well. Mrs. Bennet is still a foolish character, but Baker softens the caricature giving us a glimpse of Mrs. Hill's insight that Mr. Bennet's disregard for his wife has led to her hypochondria. Likewise, Mary's failure to attract Mr. Collins gets as much sympathetic narrative attention as Lizzie's from servants who notice her as much as the more glamorous sisters.

Apart from its re-imagining of Austen's novel, Longbourn has another, related story to tell about pleasure and desire. The tragedy for Sarah, the novel's protagonist, is that as a servant there is no space for her own interests or pleasures. Every hour of her day is claimed for someone else, and when she has her own concerns or desires, they must be squashed. When she asks Mr. Collins whether having interests of her own is wrong, he tells her that it is a question of domestic discipline and refers her to the housekeeper. Similarly, the story of Lydia's flight with Wickham becomes secondary to Sarah's own agonized need for information, but as a servant she's not even allowed to ask questions. In order to resolve Sarah's narrative, she has to leave Lizzie's love story entirely behind--and, in Baker's capable hands, that feels right.