Baker’s exceptional novel offers an original look at Jane Austen’s PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, and Emma Fielding’s performance is quietly appealing. While the Bennets, the Bingleys, and the Darcys cavort upstairs in well-appointed drawing rooms, Baker opens up the world below stairs. Fielding turns characters into genuine individuals—from housemaids Sarah and Polly to housekeeper Mrs. Hill, the mysterious newly hired servant, James, and the Bingleys’ black footman, Ptolemy. Sarah is the heart of this tale of morning-to-night drudgery, chilblains, sweat, blood, and backaches. She laments, "If Elizabeth had the washing of her own petticoats‚ she'd most likely be a sight more careful with them." Fielding’s fine portrayals offer moments of hope and awakening for the characters and, for listeners, bittersweet awareness of Sarah’s life and the lives of her downstairs family. S.J.H. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2013, Portland, Maine
Here’s your all-access pass into the ultimate historical fiction guide: revisionist history, speculative history, and good old-fashioned historical fiction can all be found here, spanning Biblical Ages through to the early new Millennium. Our list of the best historical fiction books includes bestsellers, bookseller favorites, and award winning titles.
Two novelists on the obsessions that give birth to fiction.
Jane Austen has been the gift that keeps on giving—for authors, movie producers, and Colin Firth fans—for ages now. From modern day retellings, to spinoff books that focus on her tertiary characters, to mashups featuring zombies, Austen’s novels have been adapted, updated, and otherwise celebrated to within an inch of their robust lives, and fans still can’t get enough of her elegant, […]
Friday marked the release of the movie Austenland, concerning the romantic misadventures of a Jane Austen obsessive visiting a petticoats-and-courtship–themed amusement park. Based on Shannon Hale’s 2008 novel, it’s just one of the many, many (many) offspring of Austen’s original canon. Though only 7 of her works were published, the last in 1818, she maintains […]
In the same spirit, author Jeannette Ng (Under the Pendulum Sun), whose story “How the Tree of Wishes Gained its Carapace of Plastic” appears in the collection, joins us to highlight other authors and stories that have sought to examine “classics” of Western literature. The classics cast long shadows, having been canonized in our culture […]