I’m a huge Jane Austen nerd, as most all of you know by now. I’ve read all of Austen’s novels and reviewed several of them for CBR. Two years ago, for CBR6, I embarked upon a Pride and Prejudice project, in which I reviewed several remakes or updates, including Longbourn, Bridget Jones’s Diary, Death Comes to Pemberley, and my second-favorite novelist of manners, Barbara Pym. This year, ElCicco reviewed Eligible while I was waiting impatiently for the library to discover the hold they had misplaced […]
Search Results for: Longbourn
A Wounded Hero Done Very Well
There are a lot of wounded heroes in romance novels, but His Road Home must be the first one I’ve read in which we meet the hero straight from the battlefield. Often, the men are well away from their traumatizing experience, left with a dramatic facial scar or bad dreams that can be eased by the love of the right woman and heal them. This contemporary romance novella is not that book. While serving in Afghanistan, Rey Cruz invented a fiancee to simplify a negotiation. To bolster his story, […]
Life belowstairs
Quick question – can you give me the name of a single servant in Pride and Prejudice? Despite having read the book multiple times and having just finished the audio version of the book, I certainly couldn’t do it. Jo Baker has taken the classic novel and imagined what the lives of the invisible people behind the scenes, so to speak. The very essential people who wash the mud out of Lizzie’s petticoats after she’s been walking the countryside, who help the Bennett sisters do […]
What Lies Beneath
I’m a fan of writers who tackle a famous work of literature from a new vantage point (for example, Gregory McGuire in Wicked or Jean Rhys in Wide Sargasso Sea) and do it in such a way that the end result fundamentally changes the way you view the original. Longbourn worked for me in that respect because by giving the servants in the background of Pride and Prejudice back stories and names, Jo Baker makes me see the gaps in Jane Austen’s narrative (and I […]
In the Bleak Mid-Winter
I’ve now read all of two Edith Wharton novels and she is fast becoming one of my favorite writers. With beautiful evocative prose, Wharton creates the socially circumscribed world of early 20th-century East Coast America, a bleak place where romantic tragedies occur. In The House of Mirth, the main character Lily Bart was a beautiful young woman whose family status gave her access to upper class New York society but whose sex and poverty severely limited her ability to function successfully there. In Ethan Frome, […]
The downstairs gets their turn
As an Austen fan, reading Longbourne is almost inevitable. I’ve always wondered about the story from the perspective of the servants, and what it must have been like watching Mrs. Bennett furiously attempt to marry off her daughters so that they can avoid the poverty of the servantry. How awful it must feel to watch these wealthy people parade around, attempting to catch equal or wealthier mates to avoid winding up in your own shoes. And knowing that while your own lot in life was nothing to be desired […]