What Elizabeth Would Not and I Would

It has been a Monday in many senses of the word. So I would like to take a moment to catalog all of the things which an Elizabeth Bennet of Regency England would not have had to do on her Monday.

Elizabeth would not have been sitting in lecture at eight o’clock in the morning. She would not have spent the day behind a desk typing and intermittently teaching people how to use man-eating copy machines or tracking down tricky library books which forever attempt to escape their call numbers. 

The second Miss Bennet would not have attended a resume writing workshop this afternoon and would not have stared into the perplexity of people hiring other people.

Nor would Lizzy have been handed a map of local businesses to visit tomorrow because her spring internship requires talking to strangers in a publicity campaign.

Miss Eliza Bennet would not have spent this evening analyzing Blake and Wordsworth’s London poems because Blake and Wordsworth would not have been born (let alone their poetry about the Industrial Revolution have been invented because this too would not have occurred yet).

Elizabeth would also not be typing on a laptop (because I’m pretty sure she never learned to type) about what she would not have done when all she really hoped was to fall asleep.

I sometimes wonder if Regency women ever felt truly bone-tired. Honestly, how exhausting can it be to walk into town and then spend the rest of the day sitting in a sitting room? What is a sitting room anyway? I’m pretty sure they don’t build those in houses nowadays.

This probably sounded like the snarky tirade of an ungrateful senior, and it kind of was. But sometimes, despite the fact that you have the greatest most fairy-tale-like life, you can still have a really long lugubrious Monday.

At any rate, the third week of school has descended, and I’m wondering if it is possible to feel farthest away when you’re actually the closest you’ve ever been. I hadn’t imagined until this semester how emotions like “Yah! I’m ecstatic! and “Help! It feels like I’m drowning over here,” could possible live together in the same twenty-year-old girl. But, mysteriously, they can. (I could be the poster child for coexist right now.)