Helpful Score: 1
I liked this very much, as a thought experiment -- what was going on, below stairs, as the events of Pride and Prejudice unfolded? Who were the walk-on characters, most of them left nameless by Austen, who attended Elizabeth and Jane and the other Bennets, who were the ghostly presences around the Bingleys and Mr Darcy, attending to their every whim? Is it possible that there's more to the story that Jane Austen gives us?
Of course there is -- that's the novelist's job, to focus the reader's attention on what they want us to see, to the exclusion of all the other stories going on around it. Jo Baker cleverly shifts our focus to a different set of characters, to different perspectives on characters we thought we knew, and to a different train of events.
I liked this, but I didn't think it was resoundingly successful -- not in an "I shall cherish this as much as P&P, and keep them side by side on my shelf" sort of way. It was fun. (Possibly not quite the right reaction for a book that deals with some serious issues, but serious can be fun.) It was very interesting -- having re-read P&P recently, Baker's scholarship and attention to detail in following Austen scene-by-scene was mostly a delight.
I enjoyed, but didn't always agree with, Baker's fresh perspective on some familiar characters: annoying Mr. Collins is presented as more socially awkward, and just very, very young. Mrs Gardiner, the Bennet girls' London aunt, and such a calm a common-sensical contrast to their own neurotic and embarrassing mother, achieves that inner calm by cheerfully neglecting her own children, and dumping them on other people's servants whenever possible. We're reminded that Mrs Bennet's silliness, and her "poor nerves," which have been a timeless gift to British character actors like Alison Steadman and Brenda Blethyn, were probably a direct result of the horror of her efforts to give her husband a male heir, and save his estate from entail.
Mr Wickham, you'll be glad to hear, is irredeemable, in anyone's book. Even worse, if anything. But Mr Bennet, heretofore every #Team Lizzie's favourite dad, does not come off well at all ...
Yeah ... maybe. The sycophancy and pretentiousness of Austen's Mr Collins doesn't suggest someone who would, when Austen wasn't listening, be kind to the servants. Mrs Gardiner was a creature of her time, when children were meant to be seen and not heard -- by their doting-at-a-remove parents, anyway. To have a servant commenting on how quick she was to palm them off on others seems like an anachronism.
And to be fair to Austen, she was the first to point out that, for all his caustic wit, Mr Bennet was weak. Weak to marry the flighty and (even then) neurotic Miss Gardiner. Weak not to think ahead, and plan for his entailed estate being lost to his five daughters, leaving them as much at the mercy of the pitiless economic realities of the time as their servants were. Weak for treating his daughters' future plight as a sort of personal entertainment, and ignoring just how precarious their position in society could be. To twist the knife, and completely blacken an already grayscale character, Baker introduces a plot thread for Mr. B. that isn't even hinted at in P&P. Which seems a little like cheating ...
Of course there is -- that's the novelist's job, to focus the reader's attention on what they want us to see, to the exclusion of all the other stories going on around it. Jo Baker cleverly shifts our focus to a different set of characters, to different perspectives on characters we thought we knew, and to a different train of events.
I liked this, but I didn't think it was resoundingly successful -- not in an "I shall cherish this as much as P&P, and keep them side by side on my shelf" sort of way. It was fun. (Possibly not quite the right reaction for a book that deals with some serious issues, but serious can be fun.) It was very interesting -- having re-read P&P recently, Baker's scholarship and attention to detail in following Austen scene-by-scene was mostly a delight.
I enjoyed, but didn't always agree with, Baker's fresh perspective on some familiar characters: annoying Mr. Collins is presented as more socially awkward, and just very, very young. Mrs Gardiner, the Bennet girls' London aunt, and such a calm a common-sensical contrast to their own neurotic and embarrassing mother, achieves that inner calm by cheerfully neglecting her own children, and dumping them on other people's servants whenever possible. We're reminded that Mrs Bennet's silliness, and her "poor nerves," which have been a timeless gift to British character actors like Alison Steadman and Brenda Blethyn, were probably a direct result of the horror of her efforts to give her husband a male heir, and save his estate from entail.
Mr Wickham, you'll be glad to hear, is irredeemable, in anyone's book. Even worse, if anything. But Mr Bennet, heretofore every #Team Lizzie's favourite dad, does not come off well at all ...
Yeah ... maybe. The sycophancy and pretentiousness of Austen's Mr Collins doesn't suggest someone who would, when Austen wasn't listening, be kind to the servants. Mrs Gardiner was a creature of her time, when children were meant to be seen and not heard -- by their doting-at-a-remove parents, anyway. To have a servant commenting on how quick she was to palm them off on others seems like an anachronism.
And to be fair to Austen, she was the first to point out that, for all his caustic wit, Mr Bennet was weak. Weak to marry the flighty and (even then) neurotic Miss Gardiner. Weak not to think ahead, and plan for his entailed estate being lost to his five daughters, leaving them as much at the mercy of the pitiless economic realities of the time as their servants were. Weak for treating his daughters' future plight as a sort of personal entertainment, and ignoring just how precarious their position in society could be. To twist the knife, and completely blacken an already grayscale character, Baker introduces a plot thread for Mr. B. that isn't even hinted at in P&P. Which seems a little like cheating ...
