If she could find it, and it was writ in English, she would borrow Heraclitus from the library. She bobbed a curtsy, and took her money up to her room, and put it away in her wooden box, along with the previous quarter’s pay. She is clever as well as pretty, and Mr Bennett lets her borrow his books: At the centre of the novel is Sarah, the maid, who has been taken in as a child by Mrs Hill, the housekeeper (and here also the cook, apparently a common arrangement in smaller houses). And of course, the servants are worried that when Mr Collins inherits the house, they’ll all be out of jobs.īut all this, though fascinating, is not the whole story, obviously. Wickham turns up and is even more wicked than Austen makes, him, attempting to seduce young orphaned Polly, the scullery maid. The Bingleys come to dinner and the whole kitchen is in an uproar getting everything prepared.
The family goes to the ball and the servants have to stay up until they arrive home, despite having to rise again a few hours later to clean out the fireplaces and light the stove. If Elizabeth had the washing of her own petticoats, Sarah often thought, she’d most likely be a sight more careful with them”. Lizzie walks through the fields to see Jane at Netherfield, and Sarah has to scrub the mud off her petticoats and clean her filthy boots: All the events upstairs follow precisely those in Austen’s novel, but here we see their implications for the servants. Jo Baker has had the brilliant idea of writing, not a sequel, but an account of what goes on below stairs in Pride and Prejudice.
0 kommentar(er)
