Jo Baker

Jo Baker is a British author whose Longbourn retells Pride and Prejudice from the perspective of the Bennet household's servants, revealing the unseen labor and lives that Jane Austen's novel observes but does not narrate.

Jo Baker published several novels before Longbourn (2013) gave her an international readership. The premise is elegant: Pride and Prejudice is retold not through the Bennet daughters but through the household’s servants — the cook, the housemaids, the manservant — who maintain the material conditions of the Bennet family’s genteel life and observe its romantic dramas from the kitchen and the laundry.

The novel is historically grounded in ways that Austen’s novel, which largely ignores the labor that sustains its world, is not. The work of washing clothes by hand, the conditions of domestic service, the social distance between upstairs and downstairs — these are rendered with a specificity that makes Longbourn feel like historical fiction rather than fan fiction. Sarah, the protagonist, is a young housemaid who falls for a mysterious new manservant named James, whose past is slowly revealed through the course of the novel. Meanwhile, the familiar plot of Austen’s novel proceeds upstairs, glimpsed obliquely rather than narrated.

The novel is in a tradition of “retold classic” fiction but handles the form with more discipline than most examples: Baker doesn’t compete with Austen on her own terms but occupies a space that Austen’s novel deliberately left empty. The result illuminates Pride and Prejudice — showing what it cost to produce the world it takes for granted — while standing as a satisfying novel in its own right. Baker’s subsequent novels, including A Country Road, A Tree (about Samuel Beckett) and The Body Lies, have been well received.