She says that writing Longbourn was like a dream come true: “to inhabit this much-loved world, to keep company with these characters…it was so much fun.” “It seemed to give me permission to write.” Baker has put her writing talents to good use, imagining herself into the story as Sarah, a housemaid in the Bennets’ home. “For me, it was a goosebumps moment” says Baker. Baker, a lifelong fan of Austen, had ancestors in service, and was thrilled to discover from one of Austen’s surviving letters that she once employed two Baker sisters to do some sewing for her. Longbourn, Baker’s fifth novel, is a well-written and enjoyable piece of Mary-Sue fan-fiction. With modern copyright laws, most of the fan-fiction that gets made into books by publishers is based on the works of writers long dead a notable exception being Fifty Shades of Grey, which is openly Twilight fanfictio n with the names changed to avoid lawsuits. Writers being inspired by other writers forms an integral part of any literary tradition, with significant works echoing down the generations and growing in the retelling.

But fan-fiction also has a higher calling. And it is true that, especially since the advent of the internet, and consequent ease of self-publishing, there is a plethora of poorly written wish-fulfilment drivel out there, a significant proportion of which is pornographic. Many shy away from the term, which is broadly used to describe the process whereby writers set their stories in the worlds of other authors’ books, often using other authors’ characters, and sometimes inserting themselves as a character into the story (this last is known as Mary-Sue fanfiction). Longbourn, much like that other famous piece of Austen fan-fiction, Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary, has been very popular and is due to be made into a film.įan-fiction has a slightly strange place in the ecosystem of books. There is a strong tradition of sequels, translations and reinventions of this classic tale, and the latest in this line is Longbourn by Jo Baker (published by Random House), which retells the story from the perspective of the servants.

It is an extraordinary tribute to Jane Austen and the power of her writing that now, two centuries on, readers and writers across the globe are still wanting to inhabit the world she created in Pride and Prejudice. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a fan-fiction author in possession of a Pride and Prejudice story must be in want of a publisher – not to mention a movie studio. This book is available in book stores now.

Longbourn book review