Their family needs the income and Lizzy eventually begins to understand why he is there.

Her life is upended when their family agrees to take in a lodger, a man who moves in to her bedroom upstairs, displacing her and her sister. We alternate between her story and Lizzy’s, a housemaid to a local pastor in the 19th century. She starts to feel that the house isn’t really vacant, as she begins to see and hear things she can’t explain. Her mum has recently passed and dad isn’t up to the job. Rachel, in the present, is clearing out her mum’s cottage, which sits not far from Lancaster, England, in the heart of farm country. This is a dual-timeline story, following a young mother in the present and a 19 yo woman in the mid-1800s. This one also gets a five, and I don’t give fives easily. Jo Baker’s books deserve to be more highly rated! Longbourn is her best known work, and I wanted to give it six stars. In all honesty this read would have worked much better without Rachel and the dual story as sadly it just had a negative impact on the book.

I really did want to read to the end to see what happened. Lizzy's story on the other hand was much more plausible. This would have been much more feasible storyline had she found an old journal or something and got to know Lizzy as well as she claimed to have done. She confirmed her thoughts of residency via census documents but that's all. I couldn't work out how she got to all these conclusions. She picked up on some ghostly force within the cottage and all of a sudden whilst walking through a graveyard knew exactly who had lived in the cottage and who was haunting her and why. She basically moped about and was a total pain in the arse to her husband and child and basically anyone else she spoke to.

I had no idea what Rachel was going on about half the time and found it hard to connect with her at all. Rachel in the present day who is clearing out her mothers cottage following her death and Lizzy who lived in the cottage in the 1800's. The story focusses on two main characters.

Longbourn by jo baker