The best way to describe this delightful, thoughtful and mesmerizing novel --- a kind of below-stairs parallel story to Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (and one that cries out for its own Masterpiece Classic adaptation for television) --- is to quote Jo Baker's Author's Note:
"The main characters in Longbourn are ghostly presences in Pride and Prejudice: they exist to serve the family and the story. They deliver notes and drive carriages; they run errands when nobody else will step out of doors. . .
Longbourn reaches back into these characters' pasts, and out beyond Pride and Prejudice's happy ending; but where the two books overlap. . . When a meal is served in Pride and Prejudice, it has been prepared in Longbourn. When the Bennet girls enter a ball in Austen's novel, they leave the carriage waiting in this one. . . But what the servants get up to in the kitchen, unobserved, while Elizabeth and Darcy are busy falling in love upstairs, is, I think, entirely up to them."
Beautifully written, evocative of the best and worst of late Georgian (Regency) English society and the daily lives not just of the gentry, and those with pretensions to gentility, but also the anonymous tenants and servants and laborers who did the hard work in the fields, the kitchens and the stables. Baker asserts their right to life and love and happiness too.
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