Volume 10: Pride and Prejudice and Resident Evil

Chapter 1: Welcome to the Age of Gentlemen and Ladies (Part I)

October 1792, South-East England, Hertfordshire, Longborne

Although France on the other side of the Channel was already surging in the flames of the Revolution, Britain at this time was still the same as before. Pen ~ fun ~ pavilion www.biquge.info

Longbourn, Hertfordshire, is a quintessential English countryside just twenty-five miles from the capital, London, which is a day's journey by horse-drawn carriage. By any measure, it's not a backwood, but it's also far from the hustle and bustle of the metropolis.

There was a squire in the village of Longborn surnamed Bennet, who owned a property with an annual income of two thousand pounds, and was considered a famous family here. In this family, Mr. Bennet, as a father, was an upright gentleman with a wide range of interests, a sense of humor, and a penchant for sarcasm in amusing words. And his wife, Mrs. Bennet, has no good qualities to match her husband, except for her extraordinary beauty.

It is a pity that Mr. Bennet has reached the age of gray hair, but there is still no son in the family, but he has five daughters to be written. So, as a typical little woman, Mrs. Bennet spends her days trying to find a couple of husbands for her daughters.

However, despite the Bennet sisters' reputation for their beauty, the Bennet family did not have much savings, so they could only prepare a dowry of £1,000 for each of their daughters. Mrs. Bennet, a country woman, was very vain, had a high vision, and was unheard of, uneducated, and made many jokes, and was laughed at among her neighbors, so she never got her wish in finding a son-in-law. It was dragged until the eldest daughter, Jane. Bennet is already in his twenties, which is considered an older leftover girl in this era, and none of the five girls in Bennet's family have been successfully married.

This urgency made Mrs. Bennet more and more anxious, not only because of her concern for her children as a mother, but also because of the family's financial worries: the Bennet family's estate in Longborne Village could earn a regular income of £2,000 a year, and the price of a working-class wage earning no more than £30 a year was enough to afford a carriage, a servant, and a cook, so that the family could live a pampered and prosperous life.

But the problem is that the land owned by the Bennet family is tied to military service, and according to the law it is limited to male inheritance, but the Bennet family has no sons, and it is estimated that at the current age of Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Bennet, it is impossible to have another child.

Therefore, the family lived in a very good situation when Mr. Bennet was alive, but when he died, the property and the house would be inherited by the men of the distant relatives, and Mrs. Bennet and her five daughters would be evicted from the family by the distant relatives reasonably and legally!

Obviously, it is not possible to find a good husband for a daughter who is rich and good in case of emergency, before Mr. Bennet dies. Then after Mr. Bennet's death, the remaining orphans and widows in the family will have no income, and they will sit on empty food until they are so destitute that they live on the streets.

- In England at the end of the eighteenth century, women did not have an independent economic status and source of income, their right to inherit property was also limited by law, and marriage was the only means for them to secure their livelihood. On the other hand, the class stratification of the whole country has long been solidified, the social status of different families is clearly hierarchical, personal identity is dependent on the family, marriage is the right family, and it is unthinkable to cross the ranks. As a result, the options for marriage between men and women are very limited. Mrs. Bennet's long-standing anxiety over the fact that her family had five daughters to be married was a formless sword hanging over her head—the testamentary clause that the family business could only be inherited by the male. The pressure of survival is just around the corner, and women who have no other choice can only rack their brains. And within the narrow range of the gentleman's class, it is really difficult to find so many satisfactory marriage partners for the five daughters.

Such a heavy pressure made Mrs. Bennet more and more chattering, mother-in-law, screaming and nervous twice for three days. It also made Mr. Bennet unbearable, but he had no solution to this problem, so he had to passively evade, hiding in the study all day long to read and seek to be clean.

As for the five daughters in Bennet's family, they also have their own characteristics - the eldest daughter, Jane. Miss Bennet was the most beautiful of the five sisters, gentle and virtuous, and was an undoubted good old man, who liked to think of everyone for good, and could not see anyone's shortcomings or bad intentions.

The second daughter, Elizabeth. Bennet is as beautiful as the eldest sister, but he is cheerful and lively, sincere, loves and hates, with a little cynical disdain and cleverness, and a little strong woman temperament that is ahead of his time, and is also the most favored by Mr. Bennet.

Three daughters, Mary. Bennet was the most mediocre of the five daughters, because she was no more beautiful than her sister and sister, she became a bookaholic, tried her best to achieve something in literature and music, and took every opportunity to show off, but to put it bluntly, her talents were also very average, and she could only make people laugh and cry.

Four Female Kitty. Bennet and five daughters, Lydia. Bennet, who is also a beauty in terms of appearance, is a pity that most girls of his age are empty-minded, ignorant, lazy, and vain, and still two fanatically pursuing the uniform control of handsome officers. They looked forward to lively balls and drinking parties all day long, and abandoned their reserved feelings as ladies to fool around and laugh with the "little fresh meat" in red uniforms—although these two young ladies were probably the most conservative ladies by the standards of twenty-first-century British women, at least they did not smoke marijuana or drugs, nor did they have any promiscuous ♀ parties, and they remained virgins until their marriage...... But at the end of the eighteenth century, England was already in the category of coquettishness and debauchery.

In short, they are such a noisy family. If this development continues, then Jane and Elizabeth, among the five Bennet sisters, will each find a handsome and golden wishful husband, and the heroine Elizabeth will become the mistress of a beautiful manor. The youngest sister, Lydia, will be abducted and eloped by a handsome scumbag officer, her reputation will be ruined, and her family will be annoyed, and her future will be very worrying......

- Seeing this, many readers should probably already understand that this is Jane, a famous British female writer in the early 19th century. Austen's immortal masterpiece has swept the world for 200 years, and has derived more than ten classic love masterpieces from film and television dramas, the plot world of "Pride and Prejudice".

However, in Bennet's home today, the atmosphere seems a little strange for some reason.

Mrs. Bennet, who had been noisy all day long, finally stopped holding the salt sniffer and cried out in her high-octave shrill voice how painful her nerves were. Mary, the third daughter, who originally liked to express her talents, no longer recited poems from nowhere, or played the piano with a ding-dong clang. And Kitty and Lydia, who were lively and active, did not run around the house, laughing and making a lot of noise, running around and stepping on the floor and making a burst of thumping sounds...... The family of seven was hidden in their respective rooms, and it was unusually quiet.

And behind the above abnormal phenomenon, there is an even more terrifying reason......

※※※※※※※※※※※※※※※※※※※※※※※※

Upstairs in one of the bedrooms, Elizabeth. Bennet was looking in a mirror, looking at his face.

The girl in the mirror is extremely beautiful, her complexion is as fair as milk, her facial lines are clear and soft, her nose bridge is high, like the most outstanding statue of the goddess in ancient Greece, and what is even more rare is the extremely moving smiling eyes, which seem to have a magical magic when smiling. Austin's heroine!

And what made her want to shout and scream even more was that such a peerless beauty's face actually grew on her body!

So excited! Is this the perk of crossing?

That's right, just a few hours ago, the soul of a white-collar Chinese female office worker in the twenty-first century unbelievably took possession of this Jane. The body of the heroine of Austen's romance novel - in fact, when she knew that this was late eighteenth-century England, and that it was also the plot world of Pride and Prejudice, she was very, very surprised, and she did not expect that one day she would have such a wonderful and cheating experience.

It's wonderful because as a foreign language graduate, she is also a reader who has read Pride and Prejudice. Austen's elegant rural style, romantic love stories, and gorgeous classical dresses naturally have beautiful visions and reveries in my heart.

Speaking of cheats, the Bennet family where the heroine is located, what happened to all the members who have changed their souls? There's no romance at all!

What's even worse is that after "visiting" the Bennet family mansion just now, Miss Elizabeth, who has a slight habit of cleanliness, is really very worried about the sanitary environment of this home: the walls are pasted with colorful and delicate wallpaper, and oil paintings are hung as decorations, which look decent, but why is the floor gray and rough logs? Not to mention the paint on the wooden floor, I didn't even polish it much, it was as rough as sandskin! In the corners of the walls and in the cracks of the floor, there was obviously a lot of small garbage piled up, and even the corpse of a dead mouse was found!

The most unacceptable thing for this former urban female white-collar worker is that the outside of the mansion is a bare mud floor, not to mention cement, not even paved with stones, let alone planted with shrubs or lawns. On rainy days, it will obviously turn into a mud pool, and on sunny days, it will emit a bad smell of earth.

Then, in order to be able to eat fresh meat at any time, the Bennet family kept all the chickens, ducks and geese directly in the yard, and the pigeons in the attic on the roof! And the smell of the horses was unexpectedly strong. They can be seen pooping on the stone steps of the doorway from the living room window, and smelling the obvious smell of livestock...... This made Elizabeth miss her small high-rise apartment very much, although it was only fifty square meters, but the clean and bright marble living room and tiled bathroom were all not available in this villa today - the eighteenth century was really an era that could not be hurt!

But this is also something that cannot be helped, the so-called squire in England is actually the landlord in Chinese terms. And the manor, which sounds very literary and artistic, is actually the landlord's compound...... What was the concept of the English countryside in the eighteenth century? To put it simply, dozens of households are scattered in a small area, and chicken and duck droppings can be seen everywhere when you go out. As for the fabled fresh air in the countryside, what the hell did Elizabeth dare say? The first time she arrived, she was only smoked by the smell of a mixture of several different feces.

What do you think? The romantic and charming petty bourgeois atmosphere in his mind disappeared without a trace all of a sudden, right?

Just as Elizabeth made an embarrassed expression in the mirror, her "eldest sister" Jane. Bennet reached out and pushed the door open and walked in—of course, this Miss Jane was not the same person she was, but from the same place as Elizabeth today, and a colleague in the same company.

“…… Hey! My dear! What does it feel like to be Elizabeth? Is there a feeling of going from an ugly duckling to a white swan? Jane rubbed Elizabeth's face affectionately, "...... I really envy you! All of a sudden, she became the heroine of the world's classic literary masterpieces......"

“…… Aren't you the same? And in terms of appearance, it's obvious that you're more beautiful now, okay? Elizabeth rolled her eyes unladylikely, indeed, in the mirror, Jane, as an older sister, looked noticeably more like a fairytale princess: her long hair was as golden as gold, dreamy in the sun. The smooth and delicate skin is as fair as milk, there is no flaw to be seen, the appearance is exquisite, the perfect goose egg face, golden eyebrows, pure and full of feminine feeling, long eyelashes are decorated with two big blue eyes, which can simply make people lose their souls, and the two plump things shown from the open neckline can also attract the coveted eyes of men.

“…… Yes, not only is he several years younger, but he has also changed into a beautiful skin of a world movie star, how can I say that I have earned it! ”

Miss Jian immediately shook off that trace of jealousy, held her chest and said earnestly, "...... Come! Sweetheart! In order to celebrate our transformation from an ugly duckling to a white swan, from an otaku girl who no one wants to a beautiful woman who captivates the country and the city, let's exchange a hot French wet kiss! ”

“…… Don't don't, don't! Sister doesn't have the heart to engage Ji now! Elizabeth hurriedly stretched out her hand to block the red lips that she had already pouted and was about to come over, showing a look of shame, and glanced at her with disgust: "...... By the way, how are our three 'sisters' doing now? ”

“…… Younger sister? Jane's face turned very strange, "...... It's not like you don't know, they're old enough to be our grandmothers......"

“…… But at least here, they're still teenage girls, and they're younger than us, our sisters! ”

Elizabeth pursed her lips helplessly, "...... All right! Fifty or sixty years younger all of a sudden, it's still the three of them who make the most money......"