Servants with a Voice in Jo Baker's Longbourn, a Coquel to Pride and Prejudice
Résumé
Like many others before her, Jo Baker returns to the fictional universe of Jane Austen in Longbourn (2013), a coquel whose focus is on the few servants mentioned in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice . Taking into account Sanders’s notion of “appropriation”, this chapter interrogates the formal and thematic distance taken from Austen’s work to adopt a contemporary political stance. It first examines various ways in which Baker carves her own narrative space within Austen’s novel, then how the choice of themes and characters actually takes the reader out of her comfort zone and offers a “contrapuntal” reading (Said) by throwing a new light on well-known plots and characters and/or shedding light on what happens behind the scenes. Finally, the chapter explores how and to what effect Longbourn goes beyond the ending of Pride and Prejudice.