To read or not to read...
As the 200th Anniversary of the publication of Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen draws to a close, now is the perfect time to read a new book inspired by this beloved novel. Not a sequel, a prequel, or including the paranormal, this new novel has been described as the other half of Pride and Prejudice; a reimagined tale told from a rather different perspective...
To read or not to read, that is the question! Read these opening paragraphs of this novel and you decide....
There could be no wearing of clothes without their laundering, just as surely as there could be no going without clothes, not in Hertfordshire anyway, and not in September. Washday could not be avoided, but the weekly purification of the household's linen was nonetheless a dismal prospect for Sarah.
The air was sharp at four thirty in the mornin, when she started work. The iron pump handle was cold and even with her mitts on, her chilblains flared as she heaved the water up from the underground dark and into her waiting pail. A long day to be got through, and this just the very start of it.
All else was stillness. Sheep huddled in drifts in the hillside; birds in the hedgegrows were fluffed like thistledown; in the woods, fallen leaves rustled with the passage of a hedgehog; the stream caught sunlight and glistened over the rocks. Below, in the barn, cows huffed clouds of sweet breath, and in the sty, the sow twitched, her piglets bundled at her belly. Mrs Hill and her husband, up high in their tiny attic, slept the black blank sleep of deep fatigue; two floors below in the principal bed chamber, Mr and Mrs Bennet were a pair of churchyard humps under the counterpane. The young ladies, all five of them sleeping in their beds, were dreaming of whatever it was that young ladies dream.
And over it all, icy starlight shone; it shone on the slate rooves and flagged yard and the necessary house and the shubbery and the little wilderness off the side of the lawn.and on the coveys where the pheasnats huddled, and on Sarah, one of the two Longbourn housemaids, who cranked the pump, and filled a bucket, and rolled it aside, her palms already sore, and then set another bucket down to fill it too.
Over the eastern hills the sky was fading to a transparent indigo. Sarah, glancing up, hands stuffed into ther armpits, her breath clouding the air, dreamed of the wild places beyond the horizon where it was already full light, and of how, when her day was over, the sun would be shining in other places still, on the Barbadoes and Antigua and Jamacia where dark men worked half-naked, and on the Americas where the Indians wore almost no clothes at all, and where there was consequently very little in the way of laundry, and how one day she would go there, and never have to wash other people's underthings again.
To keep reading this book, you can request it from the Library.
