Longbourn

“It did not do to speak at all, unless directly addressed. It was best to be deaf as a stone to these conversations, and seem as incapable of forming an opinion on them.”

Addressing the theme of Class Hierarchies and Visibility, the servants help maintain the pretense by being unobtrusive about their labor—ironic, since their labor is necessary to the family’s comfort. The mirrored relationships of downstairs and upstairs reflect how the servants are nonetheless paying attention, since events in the family will impact them, as events of the novel show.

“The drover’s road was ancient. It swept along the ridge, and was not surfaced or shaped like modern roads were […] The openness, the prospect here were striking; you could see steeples, villages, woods and copses miles away, and the smooth distance of far hills.”

The beaten track, not really a road that runs behind Longbourn, offers a metaphor for Sarah’s longing to see more of the world and provides a path for her to get to London and her dreams when she sets out to follow Ptolemy. This same road is the path for change in the novel; it brings James to Longbourn, and it will bring James and Sarah back at the end, when the simplicity of this rural life, and connection to family, are what they realize they really want.

“‘But to think,’ said Polly […] all of that loveliness, all that money, and all of it comes from sugar; I bet they have peppermint plasterwork, and barley-sugar columns, and all their floors are made of polished toffee, and their sofas are all scattered with marchpane cushions.”

Polly’s imagining the house at Netherfield made out of sugar is, first, a euphemism for the fact that the Bingleys’ wealth depends on enslavement. James’s explanation of the Triangular Trade is one of the ways the text incorporates the harsh historical realities of the time into her novel. The house of sugar also provides a metaphor for the luxuries that wealthy people have, which the servants are charged with the care of, but are never their own to enjoy.

“Sarah could not help but think that those stockings would be perfectly ruined, and that petticoat would never be the same again, no matter how long she soaked it. You just could not get mud out of pink Persian. Silk was too delicate a cloth to boil.”

Though Longbourn could be read as a standalone novel, its tight links with and many allusions to Pride and Prejudice add depth and texture to both. In Austen’s novel, Elizabeth’s long walk to Netherfield attracts Darcy as evidence of her vigor and spirit. Sarah, in an ironic contrast of the romantic with the material, one that exposes the narrow-mindedness and heedlessness of the genteel class, sees the challenges of laundry that will result from this scene, since it will fall to her to clean the mess Elizabeth is making of her clothing.

“Because Mr. Collins must, of course, be made to see how entirely necessary the current servantry were to the future enjoyment of his inheritance: he could, if he chose to, dismiss them all with a snap of the fingers once Mr. Bennet was dead, and this secure little arrangement would be peeled into its separate parts and flung to the four winds.”

This image of being peeled from her home and flung out of doors represents Mrs. Hill’s concerns about her financial security when Mr. Collins inherits Longbourn; her fears illustrate the precariousness of the servantry class, dependent on the whims of employer. This is another way Mrs. Hill provides a foil for Mrs. Bennet, who has the same concerns about her future. In impressing Mr. Collins, this quote speaks to the theme of Class Hierarchies and Visibility.

“James simply could not see the appeal of it himself; supper and cards at a poky townhouse in a dull provincial English town, with a frowsty old attorney and his less-than-ample missus, who’d be serving up cheese toasts and nuts and thimblefuls of sherry wine and dull conventionalities to a bunch of matrons and old fellows.”

James offers an ironic view of the entertainments that preoccupy the gentry and upper-middle class of this rural area. His scoffing at their entertainments, and company, suggests James sees something more real and honest in his gainful employment, part of the book’s suggestion that industry is a better pursuit than leisure, highlighting the theme of Personal Happiness and the Satisfaction of Work.

“Behind her, in her absence, the house was grinding along, its cogs turning and teeth linking, belts creaking, and there must come a moment—any moment now—when a cog would bite on nothing, and spin on air: some necessary act would go unperformed, some service would not be provided; the whole mechanism would crunch and splinter and shriek out in protest, and come to a juddering halt, because she was not there.”

This extended metaphor of Longbourn as an enormous machine of which she is one small but necessary component that keeps the entire mechanism going illustrates the paradox of Sarah’s position: The endless toil of domestic labor feels dehumanizing, yet at the same time, she takes pride in being important, knowing the necessity of her contribution.

“Innocence was a sheet of pristine glass, a screen from the harshness of the weather; one slip and Sarah would do terrible, bloody damage to herself, and others, and the glass would be all in pieces on the floor.”

Mrs. Hill’s image of shattered glass reflects that, even for Sarah, a girl of lower class, sexual innocence can be as important as it is for those of the Bennet girls’ station. The notion of endangered innocence is a motif that plays out in what James experiences in war, Wickham’s attention to Polly, and Mrs. Hill’s own situation, where her loss of sexual purity resulted in a child she was not allowed to keep, a grief that was heartbreaking for her.

“Because Ptolemy Bingley was something. He was brilliantly something. He would move in a different world, a world of London streets and dancing and entertainments and tobacco and faraway places where the air was like a warm bath and you’d never catch a chill. And if she kissed him now, she’d go there with him; she could swim in that world too, like a fish swims in water.”

One of the ideas that Austen examines, and Jo Baker takes up, is the way that, for women, marriage can be an opportunity to improve their socioeconomic standing, and therefore one of The Attractions of Marriage. This passage, with its rich imagery of other realms, suggests that part of Sarah’s fascination with Ptolemy is because he is so different. The warmth and the different element, water, represents the attractions of this difference and a contrast to her current position, so often cold and hard.

“[Sarah] wondered what it was like to know that you were to be married, that you would have a home, an income, that you were set up for life. To have achieved all this simply by agreeing to put up with one particular man until he died.”

This quote humorously addresses the theme of The Attractions of Marriage as a transaction, which is prevalent in Austen’s novel and threaded through Longbourn as well. Here, a touch of humor enters as Sarah imagines marriage as a bargain of tolerating a man in return for his financial advantages, but this is not so different from how she views Elizabeth’s marriage to Darcy later, which subverts the tradition of Pride and Prejudice being a grand romance.

“She knew now, without any conscious thought at all, what it meant to be alive in the world, and why their continuance in this sequestered place was entirely worth the while.”

Falling in love and being with James fulfills Sarah’s wishes for personal happiness, touching on one of the book’s major themes of Personal Happiness and the Satisfaction of Work. Many characters see Longbourn as a sheltering place, a setting that offers retreat or refuge from the harsh realities of the larger world, making the work satisfying.

“Sarah wondered what it could be like, to live like this—life as a country dance, where everything is lovely, and graceful, and ordered, and every single turn is preordained, and not a foot may be set outside the measure. Not like Sarah’s own out-in-all-weathers haul and trudge, the wind howling and blustery, the creeping flowers in the hedgerows, the sudden sunshine.”

This metaphor compares the genteel class with the servants, illustrating the loveliness and graciousness of the leisured class with the image of the country dance. But the natural metaphors used to represent Sarah’s life offer their own beauty and a strong appeal. This passage is characteristic of the text’s style and detailed language.

“[Sarah] stood there on the threshold, feeling quite transparent: the brassy polish of the doorknob seemed to shine through her hand; the evening blue leached right through her.”

The extended metaphor captures Sarah’s feeling that she is invisible to the great Mr. Darcy, underlining the way servants’ labor is routinely unacknowledged and they themselves are often invisible. This quote also suggests that the higher the rank, the less the person sees the servants who make life as a member of the gentry pleasant and often carefree.

“[Sarah] thought, There is no happiness in all the world so perfect as this: James here, and the noise and bustle of the posting-inn, and a mug of small beer that he brought for her, and put in her hand, and a slice of pie.”

Sarah’s happiness at being reunited with James is part of their love story—a love story that, with its grudging beginning and partings in the middle, parallels that of Darcy and Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice. Her pleasures are simpler; however, the novel suggests that the values held by the lower classes have more substance and value than the luxuries and fine things upon which the genteel and upper classes depend for comfort.

“In the witching hour of a winter night, she brought forth a tiny scrap of a boy, who opened blue-black eyes and studied her with sleepy wisdom, and whose suckling was a dragging ache in her breast, and whose tiny ruddy fists kneaded at her as though he was quite deliberately reshaping her and making her into someone altogether new.”

The wandering rhythm of this sentence, along with its sharp images, suggests the work of transformation that Margaret undergoes when she gives birth; transformation is a theme found elsewhere in the novel, such as Sarah’s falling in love with James. That Mr. Bennet should have a natural (meaning illegitimate) son who cannot inherit his property, according to English law, while the legitimate son did not live, is one way the text holds deeper and sometimes darker dimensions than Austen’s novel.

“All James could think was to be back in England. Hedgerows full of birds and berries. Milk. A mild sun. An old fellow who’d nod to you in passing. Who did not expect you to beat him to a bloody mess, steal his dinner, rape his wife, and burn his house down around his ears.”

This juxtaposition illustrates the horror James feels at what he witnesses during war time and the ways images of rural England offer a refuge and haven. Longbourn becomes a destination that anchors James’s journey as a character; he leaves his service aboard ship to seek Longbourn, and then he returns there with Sarah at the end.

“It had seemed like such a small thing at the time; it had seemed to be no use to him at all.”

One of the ways that Longbourn adds to and develops Pride and Prejudice is in incorporating historical realities like war and the practice of enslavement. When James sees enslaved persons in Antigua, he compares their plight to his, thinking that he sold himself to the army. What he has seen of the world gives him a different perspective from that of Sarah, who has never traveled far from Longbourn until the Bennets take her with them.

“There had been a resumption of summer finery, of lace and muslins; there were new summer bonnets to be worn: the ladies looked light and delicate as butterflies. Sarah, though, trudging up the driveway, felt as though she had been chained to a rock, and must drag it along with her, inch by inch, yard by yard.”

The image of the Bennet girls as lovely butterflies, dressed in their new, fine things, continues the contrast of Sarah as a lesser, lowlier creature. With James missing, she feels weary and hopeless, as the image of being a prisoner chained to a rock illustrates.

“[Mrs. Hill] went in much state, with a very proper bonnet on her head, the ribbons knotted with her own particular firmness, and her old linen fichu pinned underneath her chin, so that no unnecessary eighth-of-an-inch of skin would be exposed to sunshine or view.”

This description of Mrs. Hill as she goes into town is almost a caricature of respectability; her ribbons and lace, and the protection of her skin, are parallels of genteel respectability, for as a housekeeper she is considered an upper servant, higher in the hierarchy. The firmness represents her stalwart nature but her insistence on respectability is a thin veneer, since the illegitimate child in her past has been made clear.

“Mrs. Bennet was not one to tiptoe around the edges of disaster, with one eye to the abyss and another to her own comportment: she plunged headlong in, and as she fell, took pains to enumerate the discomforts and inconveniences of the fall.”

This imagery describing Mrs. Bennet’s nervous response to Lydia’s elopement exaggerates her character, provides humor, and presents an ironic parallel to the distress Mrs. Hill and Sarah feel over losing James, but which they handle much more discreetly. Mrs. Bennet can demand that her discomforts be addressed; the servants do not have that luxury.

“If you leave now, you’ll have nothing, not a bean. You’ll just be one of the multitude of young folk out of work, wandering the roads, and who will take you in then? You couldn’t come back here, after you’ve broken your word to your master. […] You’d be throwing your life away.”

Mrs. Hill stresses the concern of economic security when she points out that leaving Longbourn will move Sarah down in class from the servantry to the itinerant, a less secure position. For all that there is dependency and sometimes even kindness between the family and their servants, employment is an economic contract, not unlike marriage. Mrs. Hill’s warning also presents a parallel to James’s thought that he threw his life away when he signed on with the army.

“[Jane] was a good and pretty girl, and so deserving of good and pretty things. As everybody knew, Mrs. Hill thought as she dusted off the wineglasses for a toast, the girls who did not get good and pretty things were themselves somehow deficient, either in their goodness or their prettiness.”

This passage presents a rich irony as Mrs. Hill looks for a way to explain why the leisured classes have what they do, while others, born into different stations, have so much less. Her valuing of personal attractiveness is echoed elsewhere in thoughts about how women bargain with their own bodies for marriage, counting on attracting a match who will afford them economic security.

“Everything that she had ever known, everyone she loved, every fond association that she had formed had been stripped entirely away, and all that was left was the raw and tender pith of herself.”

Sarah’s situation changes entirely when Elizabeth marries, showing how the fate of the servants is intertwined with that of their employers. Her experience of being away from everything familiar, stripped down, mirrors James’s experience in war, offering a transformation.