Re-Walking the Paths of Pride and Prejudice: Intersectional Perspectives on Pedestrian Mobility in Jo Baker’s Longbourn

Abstract

Abstract This paper examines the appropriation of the pedestrian theme from Jane Austen’s famous novel Pride and Prejudice (1813) in Jo Baker’s rewriting Longbourn (2013). First, it analyses walking in Austen’s novel, where it appears as a mild but harmless form of female rebellion and emancipated courtship in a coherent pastoral landscape. Subsequently, it moves on to Longbourn, which, by focusing on the walking of the servants who remain marginal in Austen’s pretext, recasts this pedestrian theme as a mode of intersectional critique and subjectivises and fragments the topography of Pride and Prejudice. The paper scrutinises how Baker depicts the differences in and limits of pedestrian mobility in Georgian society under the influence of dominant ideologies of race, gender and class and finally eradicates these inequalities by constructing a female character who transgresses the boundaries that Austen’s protagonist Elizabeth Bennet always leaves intact.