This story has exceptional drama in the company of the servants of the Bennet household. A story deliciously filled with romance.Here is Georgian England with a world full of Love, poverty and brutal war. Elizabeth Bennet had been washing her own petticoats as she had been treading through muddy fields.. The housemaids at Longbourn house have disastrous chappeed, raw and bleeding hands from wash days. This novel will appeal to a wider audience. Book clubs will enjoy this memerising novel with lots of chapters and charters to discuss. This is the August 2013 book to put high on your list to buy.

We are taken through the kitchen door and into the parallel universe of the servants at Longbourn, a totally different experience from the world of Jane Austen and Pride and Prejudice. Austen characters drift in and out of the story while Jo Baker brings home to us the raw and harsh realities of the world below stairs contrasting it with the superficial and shallow preoccupations upstairs. The maid, Sarah is the same age as Elizabeth and shares with her a feistiness of character. 'The air was sharp at four thirty in the morning when she (Sarah) started work. The iron pump handle was cold, and even with her mitts on, her chilblains flared as she heaved the water up from the underground dark and into her waiting pail.' Then James Smith, the new footman makes an appearance and with him an air of mystery and hints and clues indicate secrets above stairs that Jane Austen never mentioned. I was hooked and couldn’t wait for the puzzle to be solved. In some ways Sarah’s journey mirrors that of Elizabeth and Mr Darcy. I have to admit that I am not a great lover of Jane Austen and you don’t have to be to enjoy this book or even to have read Pride and Prejudice. It stands alone as a thoroughly enjoyable read. This is the first of Jo Baker’s novels that I have read and it won’t be the last.

Longbourne for me was a such a special read.I found I could just picture the servants in what they were wearing and what the house throughout looked out. I found the story engaging and un put downable. I used to watch Upstairs Downstairs, now followed by Downtown Abbey. Longbourn certainly has such good drama that will just draw you in. I highly recommend Longbourne to all readers that like reading stories about the servants and watching Downtown Abbey. Longbourne is full of secrets, romance, poverty. I have a review about this book and more on ireadnovels wordpress com. Happy reading to all readers.

Many authors have attempted to write about the world of Jane Austen's fiction including most recently P.D James whose Death Comes to Pemberley left me a bit cold. With Longbourn however debut author Jo Baker takes an entirely new approach telling the story of the Bennett Household from a vantage point we have never seen before; that of the servants. The story is told through the eyes of Sarah one of the housemaids who doesn't view Jane and Lizzie through the same rosy tones as we might having met so many film and television versions of them. They are rather different creatures to Sarah who has the washing of their muddy petticoats and soiled linen. Longbourn shows us the harsh realities of a servant's life Sarah suffers blisters and chillblains and is sent out in the rain to fetch shoe roses. She is constantly carrying bedpans and hanging out washing. She does however find some time for romance flirting with Mr Bingley's footman a former slave who reveals that the Bingley fortune is founded on sugar and therefore on slavery. We also discover the cruelty of military life through the back story of Mr Smith. I adored this book. I found it unputdownable and can't recommend it highly enough. Presenting the world of Austen's characters in an entirely new light is no mean feat but Jo Baker has the skill and imagination to do exactly that.

When I first began reading this book I felt it was a little irrelevant that the book was set at Longbourn during the events of Pride and Prejudice - this was just a story about servants and their own personal difficulties, and the Austen connection was vague and unnecessary. But the more I read the more I think I understood: because this book was set during a time period we think we know from reading Austen and watching lavish TV adaptations. And yet the dark underbelly of the time is there in Austen's writing, but only in the vaguest of hints - the army's overt presence in Pride and Prejudice, the families making money from slaves in Mansfield Park, and the series of naive teenaged girls ruined by so-called "gentlemen" in more than one work of fiction from the time. Seeing the story from the viewpoint of a different social class casts an entirely new light on events, and makes for very interesting reading for anyone interested in the history of the period. But that aside, it is also a beautifully written story that fleshes out characters who are just background scenery in Pride and Prejudice, while at the same time believably constructing new situations and conversations for characters that we already know so well - without, as some spin-off novels have done, changing their personality beyond all recognition or believability. I loved it.