• Pride and Prejudice was only half the story •

If Elizabeth Bennet experienced the cleaning of her own petticoats, Sarah frequently thought, she’d probably be a view more cautious with them.

With this irresistibly dreamed belowstairs response to Satisfaction and Prejudice, the servants take center stage. Sarah, the orphaned housemaid, spends her days scrubbing the laundry, polishing the floors, and emptying the chamber pots for the Bennet household. But there is just as much love, heartbreak, and intrigue downstairs at Longbourn as there is upstairs. When a secret new footman arrives, the orderly realm from the servants’ hall threatens to be completely, perhaps irrevocably, upended.

Jo Baker dares to take us beyond the sketching rooms of Jane Austen’s classic-into the frequently overlooked domain from the stern housekeeper and the starry-eyed kitchen maid, into the gritty daily particulars encountered by the lower classes in Regency Britain during the Napoleonic Wars-and, in doing so, creates a stunning, fascinating, fully realized world that’s wholly her personal.