num_pages: 352
description:  Pride and Prejudice was only half the story  If Elizabeth Bennet had the washing of her own petticoats Sarah often thought shed 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 Austens classicinto 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 Warsand in doing so creates a vivid fascinating fully realized world that is wholly her own. 
language: English
title: Longbourn
publisher: Knopf