Longbourn

The text is rooted in the world that supports the lives of leisure, sociability, and courtship that preoccupy the Bennets of Pride and Prejudice. In Longbourn, the Bennets play supporting roles, and the novel examines the relationships between employer and employed to expose the hierarchies of and assumptions around the British class system. The Bennets belong to the gentry, a nebulously defined class that lay between the upper class with its titles and peerages and the middle class, which drew income from business ventures; the definition of a gentleman was that he lived off incomes from the land he owned and did not need to work. The servantry, as Jo Baker shows, had its own hierarchies of power and divisions of labor, which reflected and commented on those above them in status.

Baker depicts the gentry class maintaining its sense of superiority by viewing the classes below them as inferior persons and refusing to afford them full dimensionality as human beings. Polly is not even allowed to use her name, Mary, because one of the Bennet daughters is so named; her employers simply overwrite her identity and give her a new name that suits them. Mrs. Hill is considered a suitable sexual partner by Mr.