BKMT READING GUIDES
Longbourn (Vintage)
by Jo Baker
Hardcover : 352 pages
23 clubs reading this now
10 members have read this book
• 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 ...
Introduction
• 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.
Excerpt
Chapter II‘Whatever bears affinity to cunning is despicable.’
They were lucky to get him. That was what Mr B. said, as he folded his newspaper and set it aside. What with the War in Spain, and the press of so many able fellows into the Navy; there was, simply put, a dearth of men. ...
view entire excerpt...
Discussion Questions
1. What did you think of Jo Baker’s stylistic choice to include multiple characters’ perspectives in a single chapter? Do you think it enhanced the book?2. What were your thoughts on the beginning of Volume Three, which was dedicated entirely to James Smith?
3. How would you compare and contrast the love stories between Sarah and James, and Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy?
4. Longbourn provides an alternative angle to Pride and Prejudice. Can you think of a classic novel that you would like to see rewritten in another character’s voice?
5. What did you make of each chapter’s introductory quote? Were there any that you were particularly drawn to? Why?
6. Lizzie Bennet is a much-loved heroine. Has Longbourn changed your view of her at all? Do you think she acts selfishly in relation to Sarah?
7. For those who have read Pride and Prejudice recently, do you know the significance in Pride and Prejudice of the whipping that Sarah witnesses in Longbourn?
8. Longbourn is a book that stands alone as having its own story, characters and themes–how far has the author ensured her novel is not pastiche, that it is a novel with a separate identity?
Suggested by Members
Notes From the Author to the Bookclub
“An absorbing and moving story about the servants at Longbourn . . . Both original and charming, even gripping . . . If Charlotte Brontë had taken up the challenge of a sequel to Pride and Prejudice, she might very well have hit upon the sort of broader, more sympathetic point of view Jo Baker has derived from the servants’ quarters.” —Diane Johnson, New York Times Book Review As seen in the Ladies Home Journal Book ClubBook Club Recommendations
Recommended to book clubs by 0 of 0 members.
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