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Source: (consider it)
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Thread: Nov book group - Longbourn by Jo Baker
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Tree Bee
Ship's tiller girl
# 4033
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Posted
This month our book up for discussion is Longbourn by Jo Baker.
A clever below stairs story shadowing Pride and Prejudice.
The discussion will be led by Sarasu.
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"Any fool can make something complicated. It takes a genius to make it simple."
— Woody Guthrie
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Sarasa
Shipmate
# 12271
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Posted
Thanks TreeBee, I'd totally forgotten it was the start of the month and I'm leading the discussion this month on Longbourn. Although it is set in the world of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice you don't need to know that book to enjoy this one. Here is a review to whet your appetite and I'll post some questions on the 20th.
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'I guess things didn't go so well tonight, but I'm trying. Lord, I'm trying.' Charlie (Harvey Keitel) in Mean Streets.
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Tree Bee
Ship's tiller girl
# 4033
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Posted
Due to RL madness I won't be reading it this month, but as I've read it before I'll join in the discussion as far as my memory will allow!
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"Any fool can make something complicated. It takes a genius to make it simple."
— Woody Guthrie
http://saysaysay54.wordpress.com
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Jane R
Shipmate
# 331
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Posted
By an amazing coincidence, I bought this book last week and read it on 31st October; not because of the book group, but because I had a vague recollection that someone had said it was worth reading. So I shall be joining in the discussion too.
Posts: 3958 | From: Jorvik | Registered: May 2001
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Trudy Scrumptious
BBE Shieldmaiden
# 5647
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Posted
Loved this book and will definitely join in the discussion!
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QLib
Bad Example
# 43
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Posted
Same as Tree Bee - read it a while back, but will join in as best I can.
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Tradition is the handing down of the flame, not the worship of the ashes Gustav Mahler.
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Tree Bee
Ship's tiller girl
# 4033
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Trudy Scrumptious:
Loved this book and will definitely join in the discussion!
Jolly good! It was because of your recommendation on your blog that I read it in the first place.
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"Any fool can make something complicated. It takes a genius to make it simple."
— Woody Guthrie
http://saysaysay54.wordpress.com
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Sarasa
Shipmate
# 12271
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Posted
Just bumping this higher up the page. If you love Pride and Prejudice it might be worth dipping into this book to see what you make of her take on the characters.
Questions will be posted on the 20th.
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'I guess things didn't go so well tonight, but I'm trying. Lord, I'm trying.' Charlie (Harvey Keitel) in Mean Streets.
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Tubbs
Miss Congeniality
# 440
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Posted
Read this quite recently so will chip in!
Tubbs
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Sarasa
Shipmate
# 12271
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Posted
Here are a few questions to get us started. There are a few slight spoilers, so maybe don't scoll down if you haven't finished the book yet.
1.Did you enjoy this story in its own right, or were you looking to see where it meshed with the 'Pride and Prejudice' story?
2. What were your thoughts on the beginning of Volume Three, which was about James and his expereinces in the war?
3. Did seeing them from a different change your opinions of any of the characters in 'Pride and Prejudice'
4. Do you think Sarah should have chosen Ptolomy instead of James?
5. Did you think this was an accurate portrayal of life for servants in early 19th Century Britain?
6. If you have read any other spin offs from Jane Austen's novels how did you think 'Longbourn' compared? Was it a success, or have others captured Austen's world better.
7. Any other questions or comments?
(Code fix)
[ 21. November 2014, 07:57: Message edited by: Firenze ]
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'I guess things didn't go so well tonight, but I'm trying. Lord, I'm trying.' Charlie (Harvey Keitel) in Mean Streets.
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Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549
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Posted
I enjoyed it. It's a little bit ticking all the boxes when it comes to things that Austen doesn't write about in Pride and Prejudice, but it does so gracefully.
It's a far better book than Death Comes to Pemberley.
I think I would have preferred not to imply that the Elizabeth- Darcy marriage isn't happy. I think Austen might be a better judge of whether it would be.
I think Ptolomy is just the right degree of attractive for the third point in a love triangle.
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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
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Brenda Clough
Shipmate
# 18061
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Posted
There are far, far too many sequels, prequels, re-dos and X-rated spin-offs of the unlucky P&P. (There are whole vast websites devoted to tabulating and keeping track of these books, if you want to see the lists.)
This one is not as bad (you're right!) as Death Comes to Pemberly, nor as horrid as all the P&P & Vampires or Zombies efforts that roil the more shallow lagoons of the literary ocean. So that is certainly one positive point.
But I do feel that it is derivative. There is indeed a run-through-the-tropes quality to it: the overworked servants, the randy youth (really?!?) of Mr. Bennett. I didn't particularly enjoy reading it, and I will not need to read it again.
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Palimpsest
Shipmate
# 16772
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Posted
It was ok. The best part was the description of the physical world which is a bit more remote in P&P. While the servants were overworked, I doubt they would have noticed the smell of the slop buckets. Not having enough to eat would have been more of a worry.
The part in Spain has been done better by others, Forester and O'Brian. It did interrupt the flow of the world.
It would have been interesting to see a bit more of working class London or the farmhands.
I usually avoid P&P spinoffs. This was better than most of them.
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Sarasa
Shipmate
# 12271
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Posted
First of all sorry for mucking up the code and missing out the word 'angle' in one of the questions.
I enjoyed the story, which I thought worked best when you were seeing P&P from a different perspective. I thought it lost it's way when James went off to Spain. The only book I've read that has scenes in that war is Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell so I was half-expecting magic to happen at any minute which didn't help.
I liked the different and more sympathetic view of Mr Collins and I thought Mr Bennet's back story was at least plausable.
I thought Ptolomy was on interesting character, who seemed a bit underused. By the end he seemed to have been there just so we could get the idea that a lot of these people's wealth was based on the slave trade.
I'm assuming that it was a reasonably accurate portrait of servant lfe. I'm also assuming it's correct that very young children such as Polly were bought up to be servants which was something I didn't know.
I agree it's better than Death Comes to Pemberley which I thought was pretty awful. Until Brenda Clough mentioned it I didn't realise there were so many Austen spin-offs. The only one I'd read was a Joan Aiken which was based on Mansfield Park.
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'I guess things didn't go so well tonight, but I'm trying. Lord, I'm trying.' Charlie (Harvey Keitel) in Mean Streets.
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agingjb
Shipmate
# 16555
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Posted
I doubt if I would have read the book without its relationship to P&P.
When I hit volume 3, I sighed, and read the section as quickly as possible.
The characters from P&P:
Obviously Longbourn adds to the story of Mr Bennet, consistently? Wickham’s nastiness would probably have been more obvious to some servants.
Should Sarah have chosen Ptolomy?
Good question. Sarah’s choice is a statement by the author about Sarah’s character. Was that choice a necessity for the story?
It’s certainly quite plausible as a description of servant life.
I suspect I would have liked a rather different book that was constrained to the events within P&P, with the rivals for Sarah being more hero and villain, like the structure of the six novels.
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Refraction Villanelles
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Curiosity killed ...
Ship's Mug
# 11770
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Posted
1. Did you enjoy this story in its own right, or were you looking to see where it meshed with the 'Pride and Prejudice' story?
I started finding it interesting - good concept, but the derivative nature of some of the story lines and the way she was detailing the life with purportedly forensic detail began to irritate me (see below). The writing wasn't bad and I would be prepared to read another book by the author if it wasn't linked into someone else's work.
2. What were your thoughts on the beginning of Volume Three, which was about James and his expereinces in the war?
The Peninsular Wars are obviously happening alongside Jane Austen's books from the presence of Militia and naval officers, so it was an interesting idea. The story of James felt derived from Laurie Lee, HE Bates and other novels of the Spanish Civil War, WW1 and WW2, very loosely reset in Portugal.
3. Did seeing them from a different change your opinions of any of the characters in 'Pride and Prejudice'
The portrayal of Wickham interfering with the servants and tradeswomen made me wonder and I liked the different aspect of Mr Collins too.
But I also really hated the portrayal of Mr Bennett, partly because if he had got his housekeeper pregnant as a young man, I doubt very much he would have kept her living in the house and sent the child elsewhere. Women and servants were too expendable. Far, far, more likely that she would have been married off to one of his tenant farmers the minute she was found pregnant and if the child was a boy the farm would be settled on him. That's if Mr Bennett really cared about the housekeeper and didn't cast her off to starve (see Hardy various). A baby of the daughter of the house might get hushed up by being placed elsewhere, but not the housekeeper.
This was one of the several story lines when it was all about 21st Century sensibilities not 19th Century. Ditto the Mr Hill storyline. There would have been absolutely no need for him to be married off in Georgian times.
4. Do you think Sarah should have chosen Ptolemy instead of James?
If the book was remotely realistic she would have chosen Ptolemy, because they were far more pragmatic.
5. Did you think this was an accurate portrayal of life for servants in early 19th Century Britain?
No. The stuff I knew about was riddled with errors, which made me doubt her research for everything. Just to give a few examples:
1. Stays - stays were big until 1796, but with the advent of Regency dress all that was worn was short stays, roughly a bra, and not always. I'd be very surprised if young slim teenage girls on the catch were wearing short stays. A different shape of stays came back in with Victoria in 1840 (1837).
2. Wedding dress and veil - Austen's own books give descriptions of women wearing morning dress to their weddings, possibly white because white was the usual colour for day and summer dresses - much use of unbleached muslin. But what was worn was a dress that they could use in the future. No special wedding dresses. Veils were worn as evening and mourning wear, but as an alternative hat, not over a bonnet. Queen Charlotte wore a veil to her wedding in 1816. Most of our wedding customs around dress come from Queen Victoria's wedding in 1840.
3. Carriage makers in Harlow - Harlow in 1805 was a tiny village on the coach road to Newmarket / Cambridge, between two coaching towns - Bishops Stortford and Epping. The 1777 Chapman Andre map of Essex shows some of the other villages that were absorbed into modern Harlow as bigger at that time. Harlow might be the biggest town in the area now but that's because it is a post-WWII new town. On the maps I have of the area from the 1950s it is still only a village within the Epping Rural District Council.
This level of sloppiness was across areas of which I have knowledge, so I stopped trusting the detail of things I didn't.
6. If you have read any other spin offs from Jane Austen's novels how did you think 'Longbourn' compared? Was it a success, or have others captured Austen's world better.
Previously I have read Sanditon finished by Another Lady and that wasn't badly done. The detail was good although the storyline and writing faded away to make it obvious the latter part of the book was a modern story. It's not something I've bothered rereading.
If this is a good version of the spin-offs then that's helpful, I know not to bother in future.
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Mugs - Keep the Ship afloat
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Moo
Ship's tough old bird
# 107
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Posted
Years ago I read a spinoff called Jane Fairfax. Jane had always resented Emma. When she was a small child living with her grandmother and aunt, she had to wear Emma's outgrown clothes, which were not becoming to her.
When she went to live with the other family, she gave a sigh of relief. Then she had to come back to the village where she had spent her early childhood. She did not love Frank Churchill; she loved Mr. Knightley, and as usual, Emma got what she wanted.
If you come across the book, don't bother.
Moo
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See you later, alligator.
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Brenda Clough
Shipmate
# 18061
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Posted
Almost all of the P&P spinoffs and sequels are eye-peelingly horrible, and should be avoided. (For all love, never look into the X-rated ones, "The Secret Sex Diary of Fitzwilliam Darcy" or "Spanking Elizabet Bennett" and that ilk. There are things that cannot be unseen and unread!)
The only tolerable Austen sequel I have read is "Murder at Mansfield Park" by lynn Shepherd. This is, as you can see from the title, nothing to do with P&P, but it cleverly deals with many of the issues of Mansfield Park and works an entire mystery novel in there as well.
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agingjb
Shipmate
# 16555
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Posted
My aunt used to speak well of "Pemberley Shades", but I've never read it. Who knows?
Jane Austen is so good an author that people feel compelled to write sequels etc., but she is also so good that even the best sequels etc. (if any) suffer in comparison.
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Refraction Villanelles
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Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549
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Posted
I think the reason Longbourn is a lot better than most spin-offs is that most spin-offs are trying to do the same as Pride and Prejudice again. Why bother?
Longbourn is trying to do something different.
I think it does depend on knowing a bit about Pride and Prejudice, so that you know it's about the things that Pride and Prejudice is not about.
[ 22. November 2014, 17:00: Message edited by: Dafyd ]
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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
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Brenda Clough
Shipmate
# 18061
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Posted
That is true of all these sequels. Don't try to read Murder in Mansfield Park unless you've read MP itself.
I did read a very nice short story sequel to P&P (it ran in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction) in which the overly bookish Miss Mary Bennett, doomed to stay at home because Mrs. Bennett cannot sit by herself of an evening, runs into a young doctor who is taking a rest cure after unfortunate adventures in Geneva and the Arctic. A Victor Frankenstein; the relationship looks promising.
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QLib
Bad Example
# 43
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Posted
I really enjoyed it and I thought it accurate enough to be convincing, though I bow to CK's superior knowledge on some of the finer details. I'm not sure about people not noticing smells, but I daresay you can get used to anything, and life was probably generally more smelly.
Sarah might have been better off choosing Ptolemy, but I suspect a typical English maidservant would have seen him as too big a risk; she could not be sure how others would respond.
Like Sarasa, I found Mr Bennet's backstory sufficiently convincing. I did pause to wonder whether, as CK suggests, he would be likely to keep on a housekeeper in those circumstances, but I think it fitted with him being quite a nice man, but with very little, if any, respect for his wife.
I occasionally got a bit irritated when Baker tried to interfere with how you feel about characters in P+P. Wickham was OK, although my own guess is that he would be careful to keep the servants on his side. Mr Collins – hmmm, not really convinced by that one. He was a pompous ass an an incurable snob – I doubt he would have shown a more human side to the servants. Far more likely IMHO that they would have liked Darcy.
Nevertheless, when it wasn't trying so hard, the book did make me think about the P+P characters and more generally, about how our culture is shaped to focus on the lives of “important” people.
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Tradition is the handing down of the flame, not the worship of the ashes Gustav Mahler.
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Curiosity killed ...
Ship's Mug
# 11770
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Posted
According to the story Sarah's choices were no job as there wasn't enough employment at Longbourn with the two older sisters gone, marriage to Ptolemy (if he did actually manage a tobacco shop and didn't remain a servant), move to Pemberley and continue to be a maid or pursuit of James. The pursuit of James was by far the least safe for a single girl in 19th Century Britain.
Travelling alone on unpoliced roads or liable to be charged tolls if you travelled on the safer turnpike roads which would be something a servant girl might choose not to do to avoid paying anything. Highwaymen were still making a living on the roads in 1805. The navvy gangs, one of which James had joined, were historically full of dubious characters - and were more likely building canals. The Lake District roads to cater for tourism were slightly earlier. The Lake District was already accessible by carriage, that's why the Gardiners and Elizabeth planned to visit. The other road improvements didn't come until Telford surveyed and improved roads between 1815 and 1826. Macadam was later again - the roads around here were macadamised in the mid 1800s.
That pursuit of James was one of the 21st Century sensibility driven bits of the book.
Polly wasn't too unbelievable. Servants started as scullery maids and worked up to kitchen maids and there was a similar route for the housemaids. (I was told stories as a child from both sets of grandparents, old people in the villages where I grew up, but also things like the Victorian kitchen books and programmes chatted about this.)
In the early 1800s, children started working very young, as young as 6. This was the period when children lived and worked in factories, called parish apprentices, but really orphans employed as expendable labour for the dangerous jobs. There were many available children who could be easily replaced. (Factories are thought of as Victorian, but they really started in the late 1700s.)
It really is within the times to take on children from the poor house as employees, but actually it would be more likely to be a child from one of the tenant farmers would be taken into service at one of the local big houses. Part of the society quid pro quo - so Sarah's employment is possibly more likely as a known family and way of supporting the surviving child, not so sure about an unknown child.
[ 23. November 2014, 00:16: Message edited by: Curiosity killed ... ]
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Mugs - Keep the Ship afloat
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Trudy Scrumptious
BBE Shieldmaiden
# 5647
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Posted
I loved, loved, loved this book. Could not put it down. Now, I read it almost a year ago, and it's interesting to see what has lingered with me from that reading. Looking back over the discussion here, I realized that not only did I retain no memory of Ptolomy, I also had completely forgotten that there was a section of the book that dealt with James's war experience. Memory had just edited out those bits so they obviously didn't leave a big impression on me.
What I loved were the depictions of life in domestic service, the massive amount of unseen physical labour required to maintain even a modest household like the Bennett home, and how taken for granted the position of servant was - both by those who filled it, and those who employed them. I loved Sarah as a heroine -- I thought she was a great working-class version of Elizabeth Bennett, and the novel did such a great job of showing how an intelligent mind and an independent spirit could affect the choices of a woman of the servant class, how her opportunities were so much more restricted even than those of the Bennett girls (which are restricted enough by modern standards). I felt that Sarah/James were meant to be a sort of below-stairs Elizabeth/Darcy -- the smart, determined woman and the taciturn, enigmatic man -- and really enjoyed seeing that play out against a completely different class background.
The period details FELT authentic to me, but then I'm not an expert in that particular period and I do understand the feeling Curiosity Killed describes, of finding a few details in a novel wrong on a subject you know a lot about, and then mistrusting the rest. I imagine some of the basic details of the things I found interesting -- women's domestic labour -- wouldn't have changed a whole lot over several centuries.
The book didn't, to my mind, have the flaw of so many historical novels that makes the heroine a twentieth or twenty-first century woman in period costume. All the characters seem to understand the gender and social class roles placed upon them by society, accept them (not always happily, but I'm sure people didn't always accept them happily!) and work within them. They don't seem to import into their world questions that only we would think of, like "Why can't you clean your own dirty chamber pot Miss Bennett?"
I loved the Sarah/James love story. Her long walk to go find him at the end did seem a bit over-the-top, even in an era when people took walking everywhere far more for granted, but I didn't think of that as importing a modern sensibility (I don't think walking across a big chunk of England would occur to most modern readers as an obvious way of getting places) -- rather, it was a sort of novelist's "big dramatic finish" that strained credibility a little, but not too much.
So yeah, on the whole it was a very good read for me. I like Pride & Prejudice and the other Austen books but wouldn't call myself a huge fan. I haven't read a lot of spinoffs, though I will confess to having loved Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. What really drew me into this book was the below-stairs perspective: I've always been interested in the lives of servants and seeing how they fitted into and around the edges of such a well-known story was great for me. Along the same lines I've just finished Lois Leveen's Juliet's Nurse which does much the same thing for Romeo and Juliet, and enjoyed it very much as well.
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Books and things.
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Trudy Scrumptious
BBE Shieldmaiden
# 5647
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Curiosity killed ...:
It wasn't a few details I found wrong, it was the underlying basis for several me the plot lines too.
And, as I said, I totally understand how that would ruin the book for you. It didn't for me, but then, this isn't my period/era of expertise.
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Books and things.
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Trudy Scrumptious
BBE Shieldmaiden
# 5647
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Posted
To expand on that a bit more -- I was responding to your post in which you mentioned stays, wedding dresses, and carriage makers as "details" that you found to be incorrect, which made you mistrust the rest, so that was what I meant when I made reference to your post. I have had that experience often too with books -- thinking "If they got this wrong, how can I trust that the other things are correct?" But none of the three specific things you mentioned were things I would have picked up on because they're outside my area of knowledge, so they wouldn't have that effect on me.
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Books and things.
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Curiosity killed ...
Ship's Mug
# 11770
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Posted
It has been interesting, because I have double checked my gut feelings on a lot of these points when answering on this thread and most of the time have confirmed that my unease was backed up by the history. I'm really not an expert, but:
- I'm interested in fabrics and dressmaking so have paid attention to the clothes on visits to museums over the years,
- I have taught an after-school history club in Harlow, so learnt a lot of that local history,
- been involved in the local history society, researching a building through 1300 to the 1750s, reading laundry lists and servant lists and trying to work out which rooms existed and how many people were employed;
- listened to people/read books over the years discussing service or how many servants were involved in running a house;
- attended a lecture about how the road system around here developed (which led to some of the theories around the building above);
- tend to read up on the local history wherever I've lived.
The slave trade links didn't surprise me at all. The 1750 rebuilding of the house I was researching was based on money from slavery (the next rebuilding in the late 1800s was from railway money) and what was the manor house in the village where I grew up (now no longer there, just the home farm) was also funded by slavery. And there are paintings in the National Gallery that have black faces in London and other scenes from the 17th century onwards. It was fashionable to have a decorative black page for a while.
Manor houses and landed gentry tended to have a home farm and several other farms to provide enough revenue to support the manor house - which was rather the set up I was imagining for Longbourn.
I just think it's sloppy to talk about James building roads in the Lake District with a navvy gang* when there were navvy gangs at that time building the canals, for example. And the Lakes roads were already built by 1805, as is obvious from P&P and the plan to visit the Lakes, following the tourism boost from Wordsworth et al in the late 1700s.
* I am not even sure the Lakes roads were built with navvy gangs. Road building was a way of employing the unemployed in quite a few places when the roads were built initially, or the responsibility of the parish they travelled through, which meant church wardens who sold beer to raise the funds. The toll roads were all very individually run.
I have a copy of a very esoteric map of the toll roads around here from about 1593 which only shows those houses that funded the roads and the toll roads (plus some fascinating windmills).
And that's another detail missing - water or windmills, taking wheat for grinding or buying from the mill. The Harlow parishes are all very long and thin with a thin edge along the river Stort so each parish each takes a share of the resources. A bit of river front for a watermill and access to transport, a bit of water meadow, some fertile soil for farming, some woodland for resources, and an area for housing.
Navvies are more linked to the canals and railways.
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Mugs - Keep the Ship afloat
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Jane R
Shipmate
# 331
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Posted
1.Did you enjoy this story in its own right, or were you looking to see where it meshed with the 'Pride and Prejudice' story?
Both, really. I thought it was quite well done (though somewhat over-written for my taste) and I didn't agree with all the author's interpretations of the original text.
2. What were your thoughts on the beginning of Volume Three, which was about James and his experiences in the war?
If you must know... "Whoa! WTF?! Oh. Well, I suppose so."
It was fairly obvious that something like that must have happened to James. I don't think she needed to show it and it was the weakest part of the book, especially the bit where he was rescued by the Spanish family. There are plenty of sources about the Peninsular war; she might have taken her ideas from those rather than more recent material, but it didn't really work for me. Part of the problem is his attitude towards the artillery horses; I suppose it's just possible that he might have killed the sadistic sergeant in a fit of rage after the sergeant killed his favourite horse, but people were a lot less sentimental about animals then and I think he'd have had more immediate things to worry about. I found it hard to believe that the British had bothered to kill their horses before retreating, but apparently they did (in order to deny them to the enemy), so that part was accurate.
3. Did seeing them from a different change your opinions of any of the characters in 'Pride and Prejudice'
No. This is someone else's idea of what was going on in the background to 'Pride and Prejudice'. I see no reason to change my own opinions where they differ from hers. What Jane Austen would have thought of it is anyone's guess, but as she herself belonged to the Evangelical movement which opposed slavery (there are hints about this in Mansfield Park, too subtle for a modern reader to pick up without footnotes) it is highly unlikely that she intended her readers to assume that the Bingleys' fortune had been earned through slavery (there were other ways of earning a fortune in Regency England, though you'd never guess it from reading 21st century historical novels). That's the biggest weakness in characterization, to my mind, although I did like Ptolemy Bingley as a character.
4. Do you think Sarah should have chosen Ptolomy instead of James? Frankly, yes. I couldn't understand what she saw in James and Ptolemy was obviously besotted with her. The fact that he was black wouldn't have been considered a deal-breaker, if he was a successful businessman able to provide for a wife and family - and he obviously could have been if he'd set his mind to it. The whole thing about her refusing a respectable offer of marriage and giving up a good job to tramp around England on her own looking for a penniless deserter was just... weird. A 21st century solution, as others have said. Quite apart from anything else, a sensible girl in those days (and Sarah is repeatedly asserted to be sensible) would take advice from her friends before deciding who to marry, and Mrs Hill would have advised her to go for Ptolemy once she'd been convinced that he really loved her and would be able to support a wife.
5. Did you think this was an accurate portrayal of life for servants in early 19th Century Britain? Yes and no. I didn't pick up on all the things that CK mentions (not being such an expert on details of domestic life) but it did strike me as odd that she kept noticing the horrible smells. And as I said above, I thought some of the descriptive passages were slightly over-written.
6. If you have read any other spin offs from Jane Austen's novels how did you think 'Longbourn' compared? Was it a success, or have others captured Austen's world better.
I thought it was far better than 'Death at Pemberley', my opinion of that cannot be adequately expressed in Heavenly language. The only other Austen pastiche I've read was 'Pride and Prejudice and Zombies' and it was really not necessary for the author of that to go through the entire book; we got the 'joke' after the first paragraph.
7. Any other questions or comments?
In no particular order:
I also thought it was unlikely that Mr Bennett would have kept Mrs Hill on as the housekeeper after she had his baby. She'd have been thrown out onto the street or married off to one of the tenants.
I quite liked the more sympathetic portrayal of Mr Collins and the three younger girls.
The author obviously liked Jane and Elizabeth, but I thought her portrayal of Elizabeth was... how shall I put it... dimmer than the sparkling, witty Elizabeth of the original book. It was interesting that she also picked up on the ambiguity of Elizabeth's remarks to Jane and Mr Bennett on the subject of her relationship with Mr Darcy at the end of the book; a cynical person might indeed interpret them to mean that Elizabeth has fallen in love with Pemberley and is just marrying Mr Darcy for that, but I don't think myself that Jane Austen intended this implication.
Finally, Wickham: I think it is perfectly consistent with Jane Austen's portrayal of him to make him the kind of man who gropes the maidservants but I didn't care for the implication that he was a paedophile; this is reading 21st century demons back into the original text. There is no suggestion that Wickham eloped with Lydia because she was more sexually immature than the other Bennett girls; Lydia is 'out' because she is old enough to be married, which in the early 19th century would have meant that she was considered physically mature. I think if you went back to the original text you could find more justification for the view that Wickham eloped with Lydia because he really did fall in love with Elizabeth and realised that she was far too intelligent to agree to run away with him; then he decided to elope with Lydia because she looked a bit like Elizabeth and was too young and silly to say no when he asked her.
Posts: 3958 | From: Jorvik | Registered: May 2001
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Tubbs
Miss Congeniality
# 440
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Posted
1.Did you enjoy this story in its own right, or were you looking to see where it meshed with the 'Pride and Prejudice' story?
Yes I did. It worked well as a life below stairs story, but seeing where it meshed with P&P and where it diverted was interesting. That was probably what prompted me to read it.
2. What were your thoughts on the beginning of Volume Three, which was about James and his experiences in the war?
The further the author got from Longburn the weaker the story and the characterisation got. That bit was okay, but it was a bit flat and felt more like it was there to move the plot along than for anything else.
3. Did seeing them from a different change your opinions of any of the characters in 'Pride and Prejudice'
The servants would have seen and noticed different things to those above stairs so getting their perspective was interesting, but I’m not sure it was entirely correct. Collins would have been dreadful to everyone surely?! The bit about Collins and Maria was clever though – and in a way, she would have been the logical choice for him.
4. Do you think Sarah should have chosen Ptolomy instead of James?
The one thing the author neatly side-stepped was whether the fact that Ptolomy was black was the ultimate deal breaker. On paper, he would have been the better candidate – a man with prospects who was just about to set up his own shop who was besotted with her?! So of course you’d go for the bloke who disappeared into the night …!
5. Did you think this was an accurate portrayal of life for servants in early 19th Century Britain?
This is not my area of expertise. On the whole it was convincing, but accurate?! Can’t judge.
6. If you have read any other spin offs from Jane Austen's novels how did you think 'Longbourn' compared? Was it a success, or have others captured Austen's world better.
Unlike some of the other Austen spin-offs I’ve read, this doesn’t read like a piece of bad Austen fan-fic. (Take a bow, “Death comes to Pemberly”!) It was a story in it’s own right. It would have worked without the P&P connection with a bit of tweaking. My favourite is still “Murder at Mansfield Park”. Fanny Price gets bludgeoned to death. Who could have done such a thing? Well, apart from legions of A-Level students of course!
Tubbs
[ 24. November 2014, 14:42: Message edited by: Tubbs ]
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"It's better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool than open it up and remove all doubt" - Dennis Thatcher. My blog. Decide for yourself which I am
Posts: 12701 | From: Someplace strange | Registered: Jun 2001
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Jane R
Shipmate
# 331
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Posted
Thinking about it again, she seemed to go off Ptolemy after kissing him when he'd been smoking a cigar. I wasn't sure whether this was likely or not; cigar-smoking was only just starting to become popular then, but a lot of men smoked pipes. I wouldn't have thought a real servant-girl of that period would have such a 21st-century aversion to the smell of tobacco smoke. Ladies, of course, could be as pernickety as they liked about it...
We're back to smells again, aren't we.
Posts: 3958 | From: Jorvik | Registered: May 2001
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Brenda Clough
Shipmate
# 18061
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Posted
That is a very 21st century way of indicating villainy/ineligibility/general negativity. The signal that tobacco gives the reader or viewer these days is very different than what it was even a hundred years ago. Remember how Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane are always smoking cigarettes? It was a sign of their urbanity/sophistication/education.
The only way to actually put on the view of a historical period is to read work written at that period in time. The writer always carries her own period with her; she has no choice -- our time is a part of us, as the water is part of the fish. Baker instinctively writes as a 21st century woman, for her 21st century audience, even though she has put on all these Austen trappings.
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Science fiction and fantasy writer with a Patreon page
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Trudy Scrumptious
BBE Shieldmaiden
# 5647
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Posted
Of course the only way you can read a book set in, say, the early nineteenth century and be sure it accurately reflects the views and opinions of the early nineteenth century is to read a book actually written in that time period, but that doesn't negate the value of historical fiction. It's more difficult for a modern author to truly get into the mindset of a character from 200 years ago; some do it better than others (and readers often disagree about whether a particular author has done it well or badly). Also, a modern author of historical fiction will make factual errors that an author writing about her own time period will never do, because research is no substitute for lived experience.
But the flip side of that (and we've had this very same discussion here before, specifically about the Lord Peter Wimsey novels and the later "sequels" by JPW), there are aspects of life in the past that authors of that time DON'T portray, and a modern author will, not because they didn't happen but because it wasn't considered either polite or important to write about them. It wouldn't have occurred to Austen to write about the private lives of the servants at Longbourn, much less about the daily toil of their lives, and we won't learn much about that from reading the fiction of the period. Indeed, if we stuck to nineteenth century fiction we might have the impression that hardly anyone ever had sex, and nobody went to the bathroom. Not only would we not know who cleaned the Bennetts' chamberpots, we might assume they never used chamberpots at all!
So if you want to read about things like the sex lives of Austen's characters, or the people who cleaned their houses, or any of the aspects of life she wouldn't have considered it either interesting or proper to write about, you do have to go outside Austen, most likely to a modern writer of historical fiction who may lack the benefit of firsthand knowledge of the time, but also lacks the constraints of that period's morality and class-consciousness.
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Books and things.
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Posts: 7428 | From: Closer to Paris than I am to Vancouver | Registered: Mar 2004
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Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Trudy Scrumptious:
Indeed, if we stuck to nineteenth century fiction we might have the impression that hardly anyone ever had sex, and nobody went to the bathroom. Not only would we not know who cleaned the Bennetts' chamberpots, we might assume they never used chamberpots at all!
Oddly I think this is less true of Austen than of, say, George Eliot. In Austen I think we're aware that she's operating according to a convention whereby she doesn't bring such things up in conversation. George Eliot gives the impression that she talks about everything, and therefore when her characters don't have sex it's as if they don't have sex. One gets the impression from her novels that women conceive by smell.
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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
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Jane R
Shipmate
# 331
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Posted
Brenda: quote:
The signal that tobacco gives the reader or viewer these days is very different than what it was even a hundred years ago. Remember how Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane are always smoking cigarettes? It was a sign of their urbanity/sophistication/education.
That's true, but two hundred years ago things were different again. Women did not smoke - at least, respectable women didn't. A lot of men did, but as far as I can tell (a real expert will probably be along to correct me in a minute) it was mainly pipe-smoking. The upper classes seemed to prefer taking snuff (snorting shredded tobacco up your nose). Cigars were just beginning to be popular. Lower-class women would have been used to the smell of smoke because they didn't have the luxury of a smoke-free environment; upper-class women would have been able to exclude smokers from their drawing rooms and boudoirs.
A hundred years or so later, around the time of Peter and Harriet, women did smoke, but as you say it was a sign of sophistication/urbanity (or a yearning for glamour); older women like Miss Climpson wouldn't normally have smoked and most smokers would ask permission before lighting up in someone else's house rather than assuming it was OK.
Posts: 3958 | From: Jorvik | Registered: May 2001
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Tubbs
Miss Congeniality
# 440
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Trudy Scrumptious:
Of course the only way you can read a book set in, say, the early nineteenth century and be sure it accurately reflects the views and opinions of the early nineteenth century is to read a book actually written in that time period, but that doesn't negate the value of historical fiction. It's more difficult for a modern author to truly get into the mindset of a character from 200 years ago; some do it better than others (and readers often disagree about whether a particular author has done it well or badly). Also, a modern author of historical fiction will make factual errors that an author writing about her own time period will never do, because research is no substitute for lived experience.
But the flip side of that (and we've had this very same discussion here before, specifically about the Lord Peter Wimsey novels and the later "sequels" by JPW), there are aspects of life in the past that authors of that time DON'T portray, and a modern author will, not because they didn't happen but because it wasn't considered either polite or important to write about them. It wouldn't have occurred to Austen to write about the private lives of the servants at Longbourn, much less about the daily toil of their lives, and we won't learn much about that from reading the fiction of the period. Indeed, if we stuck to nineteenth century fiction we might have the impression that hardly anyone ever had sex, and nobody went to the bathroom. Not only would we not know who cleaned the Bennetts' chamberpots, we might assume they never used chamberpots at all!
So if you want to read about things like the sex lives of Austen's characters, or the people who cleaned their houses, or any of the aspects of life she wouldn't have considered it either interesting or proper to write about, you do have to go outside Austen, most likely to a modern writer of historical fiction who may lack the benefit of firsthand knowledge of the time, but also lacks the constraints of that period's morality and class-consciousness.
True. Austen also wouldn't have written about it because she'd have assumed that life below stairs was of no interest to her readers. And because she wouldn't have known about it. Austen wrote about her world. And her world was the drawing room rather than the kitchen. That said, she shows an awareness of the issues that women faced and touched on them very gently - the ever increasing poverty and reliance on charity of the Bates family; the uncertainity of Harriet's social position as she was a natural child; Jane Fairfax needing to earn a living etc. (Sorry, Emma is the one I've read most recently so that's where all my examples come from. I'm sure there's stuff in the other books too!)
And that's before you touch on every changing social attitudes, language etc. Even in fan-fic, you'll get people asking for "Brit pickers". [People to review a finished story and pick out the stuff we'd never say, do or pieces of local colour that are from the wrong side of the ocean!]
Tubbs
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"It's better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool than open it up and remove all doubt" - Dennis Thatcher. My blog. Decide for yourself which I am
Posts: 12701 | From: Someplace strange | Registered: Jun 2001
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Brenda Clough
Shipmate
# 18061
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Posted
Yes, what fascinates me is not what Austen put into the work, but what she left out because it was understood by all her readers. You can particularly see this as you go back in time, in literature. The Victorians and even Austen are close enough to us that we can do all right. Gradually, as you read older and older material, it's more and more alien. The mindset of, say, a Roman is very different indeed.
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agingjb
Shipmate
# 16555
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Posted
The house at Chawton is probably smaller than Longbourn. I wonder how distant from the lives of servants Miss Jane Austen could be, although they form little to no part of her novels.
The houses at the centres of the Chawton novels. Mansfield Park, Hartley and Donwell, Kellynch, are all splendid, like Pemberley, and are all contrasted with much less splendid households.
I've often questioned just how various and different the Bennet sisters are; does "Longbourn" shed any light on this.
Does it make sense to wonder if Ptolemy Bingley is the illegitimate son of Charles Bingley's father? There would be a parallel with James. And he is presented, like Charles Bingley in P&P, as a good natured character, giving Sarah a hint of James's location despite his continuing interest in her.
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Refraction Villanelles
Posts: 464 | From: Southern England | Registered: Jul 2011
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Sir Kevin
Ship's Gaffer
# 3492
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Brenda Clough:
That is a very 21st century way of indicating villainy/ineligibility/general negativity. The signal that tobacco gives the reader or viewer these days is very different than what it was even a hundred years ago. Remember how Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane are always smoking cigarettes? It was a sign of their urbanity/sophistication/education.
No it wasn't for Lord Peter Wimsey: real men smoke cigars or pipes as I used to do!
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If you board the wrong train, it is no use running along the corridor in the other direction Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Writing is currently my hobby, not yet my profession.
Posts: 30517 | From: White Hart Lane | Registered: Oct 2002
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Jane R
Shipmate
# 331
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Posted
Not in 1920s Britain, Sir Kevin. Working-class men smoked Woodbines, young men-about-town would have insisted on a more expensive brand. Lord Peter smoked Sobranies. Check out Murder must advertise, for example; there's a lot about smoking habits in there as a result of Peter working on an advertising campaign for a particular brand of cigarettes.
Posts: 3958 | From: Jorvik | Registered: May 2001
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Jane R
Shipmate
# 331
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Posted
Making a strenuous attempt to return to the subject, I just assumed Ptolemy was meant to be the illegitimate half-brother of Jane's Mr Bingley; it seemed likely, given Jo Baker's decision to introduce slavery as a theme. I hadn't noticed that it mirrored James's situation, but you're right, it does. Real life is not usually that tidy.
The five Bennett sisters are not all created equal in the original novel. Jane and Elizabeth are fully developed characters. Lydia is also fairly well developed. Mary is more of a caricature and Kitty is basically just a stock figure created to provide Lydia with a confidante. The thing I always wondered about was how Jane and Elizabeth had managed to grow up so sensible and well-adjusted with absolutely no encouragement from Mrs Bennett. Presumably Mr Bennett took more of an interest in his family when they were young and gave them more attention than the three younger girls.
Posts: 3958 | From: Jorvik | Registered: May 2001
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Brenda Clough
Shipmate
# 18061
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Posted
It is clear in P&P that Lizzie is his favorite, and that he tolerates Jane well. But Mr. Bennett seems to regard his younger three with indifference shading into contempt. (This could be handily explained by the fact that they are not the boys he was counting upon to cut off the entail that eventually benefits Mr. Collins.)
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Posts: 6378 | From: Washington DC | Registered: Mar 2014
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Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549
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Posted
Yes. Mr Bennet is a trap character: he's funny and he sides with Elizabeth, the protagonist, so we read the book as if he's a good guy. But really he's not: something he realises at the end of the book.
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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
Posts: 10567 | From: Edinburgh | Registered: Feb 2004
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Brenda Clough
Shipmate
# 18061
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Posted
(Returning to original topic) I do not feel that LONGBOURNE really gets to the root of this. We do not get a new and better light into Mr. B's character by thinking of him having sex with Hill. This feels gratuitous, something that Baker invented rather than something that springs from the characters.
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Science fiction and fantasy writer with a Patreon page
Posts: 6378 | From: Washington DC | Registered: Mar 2014
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Tree Bee
Ship's tiller girl
# 4033
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Posted
1.Did you enjoy this story in its own right, or were you looking to see where it meshed with the 'Pride and Prejudice' story?
Both really. What I loved about it was seeing the same story from a different perspective.
I thought it was cleverly done.
2. What were your thoughts on the beginning of Volume Three, which was about James and his experiences in the war?
Having read this a while ago, like someone else up thread I had forgotten this part.
3. Did seeing them from a different change your opinions of any of the characters in 'Pride and Prejudice'
I hated Wickham even more!
5. Did you think this was an accurate portrayal of life for servants in early 19th Century Britain?
Not having studied this period, I don't know, and for me this didn't matter. Though I understand how finding inaccuracies can totally spoil enjoyment.
6. If you have read any other spin offs from Jane Austen's novels how did you think 'Longbourn' compared? Was it a success, or have others captured Austen's world better.
Best I've read! I've recommended Longbourn to many.
7. Any other questions or comments?
Just to mention how much I enjoyed the Lizzie Bennet Diaries! Sorry, irrelevant!
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"Any fool can make something complicated. It takes a genius to make it simple."
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Posts: 5257 | From: me to you. | Registered: Feb 2003
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Trudy Scrumptious
BBE Shieldmaiden
# 5647
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Tree Bee:
7. Any other questions or comments?
Just to mention how much I enjoyed the Lizzie Bennet Diaries! Sorry, irrelevant!
Well, the questions did ask about other adaptations and sequels of Austen, so I think it's relevant! It was actually watching LBD that got me to reread P&P for the first time in many years, so it was fresher in my mind when I read Longbourn.
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Books and things.
I lied. There are no things. Just books.
Posts: 7428 | From: Closer to Paris than I am to Vancouver | Registered: Mar 2004
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