Longbourn (50 page)

BOOK: Longbourn

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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—they are the “proxy” by which the shoe-roses for Netherfield Ball are fetched in the pouring rain. But they are—at least in my head—people too.

Longbourn
reaches back into these characters’ pasts, and out beyond
Pride and Prejudice
’s happy ending; but where the two books overlap, the events of this novel are mapped directly onto Jane Austen’s. 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. I have interfered only so far as to give names to the unnamed—the butler, footman, and second housemaid—and to bestow on Mrs. Hill the role of cook as well as housekeeper; such an arrangement was not uncommon in households of this size and standing. 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.

One final note: in
Pride and Prejudice
the footman appears just once in the text, when he delivers a note to Jane (page 31 of Volume One, in my Penguin Classics edition). After that, he is never mentioned again.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I can’t remember when I first read
Pride and Prejudice
. It seems as if I’ve always loved it. Jane Austen’s work was my first experience of grown-up literature, and has supplied a lifetime of pleasure: it’s the only book that, as an adult, I re-read. Even after all these years, all those re-readings, and even after unpicking the backing to look at the underside—I still love it. I still admire it. And to inhabit it in this different way has been an unalloyed pleasure.

But there are other books, too, to which I am particularly indebted. Maggie Black’s
A Taste of History
and
The Jane Austen Cookbook
, edited by Maggie Black and Deirdre Le Faye, provided me with ideas for dinner; Charles Esdaile’s
The Peninsular War
, Robert Harvey’s
The War of Wars
, Richard Holmes’s
Redcoat
all supplied essential detail—both military and personal—for James’s experiences in Spain and Portugal. Jane Austen’s
Letters
, edited by Deirdre Le Faye, Carolyn Steedman’s
Labours Lost: Domestic Service and the Making of Modern England
, Amanda Vickery’s
Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England
, Andrew White’s
Life in Georgian Lancaster
, and Ben Wilson’s
Decency and Disorder 1789–1837
offered invaluable insight into domestic and social life in this fascinating and unstable period.

And there are people to thank, as well as books. Daragh, for twisting my arm. Saleel, for keeping lookout. Diana, Jane and Marianne, for nudging me along. Clare, for staying put. And my mum and dad, for not thinking twice about letting me play out all day, when I was little, in the ramshackle outbuildings of a nearby Georgian house, where there was a big, echoing kitchen, a disused necessary house, and empty stables with a ladder at the back, which led up to the sunlit stable loft above.

A Note About the Author

Jo Baker was born in Lancashire, England, and educated at Oxford University and Queen’s University Belfast. She is the author of
The Undertow
and of three earlier novels published in the United Kingdom:
Offcomer
,
The Mermaid’s Child
, and
The Telling
. She lives in Lancaster.