I Am Quite at My Leisure: A Journey Through Jane Austen, Stardew Valley, and the Romanticization of Spare Time
by Ireland Headrick
Donald Sutherland sinks back in his chair, tears gated, eyebrows wild and raised, preparing to deliver Mr. Bennet’s final lines in Joe Wright’s 2005 film adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. He is dressed in a voluminous white frock, his cravat wrapped up to the chin, his brown waistcoat buttoned almost, but not quite, to the top. In the generous light of a double-hung window, he sits underneath a dark-toned oil painting of a sheep. The desk in front of him is piled with books, suggesting an interest in reading, as well as a white orchid and a watering can, suggesting an interest in horticulture.
Keira Knightley, as his daughter Elizabeth, takes the seated man by his sloping shoulders and embraces him gratefully.
“I could not have parted with you, my Lizzy, for anyone less worthy,” Sutherland says.
Knightley kisses his broad forehead.
“Thank you,” she whispers.
And with a lovesick laugh, she rushes out of the room with exactly what she came for: her father’s hearty consent to marry Matthew MacFayden’s Mr. Darcy.
“If any young men come for Mary or Kitty, for heaven’s sake, send them in,” Sutherland calls out after her. “I am quite at my leisure.”
This interpretation of the fifty-ninth chapter of Jane Austen’s most famous novel is a close one. The dialogue is near-exact, the characters’ emotions and affections backed by the same sequence of events: When Elizabeth first met Mr. Darcy, she found him arrogant and standoffish, but through his long-anonymous acts of generosity toward her family, bad first impressions were overcome, and true love, blessed by a kind-hearted head of house, prevailed.
The magic of Austen’s storytelling lies in its excellent formula, as literary magic usually, paradoxically, does. Her oeuvre wells with romance not because she mastered the art of catch-and-release or continually pushed the boundary of craft, but because she developed a style that was comfortable enough to continue in, a style that grew organically from her favorable economic situation as a member of the landed gentry in turn-of-the-nineteenth-century England.
Austen was born in Steventon Rectory, Hampshire, in 1775. She started writing short stories in her pre-teens and published her first novel, Sense and Sensibility, in 1811. Over the next, and last, six years of her life, she saw Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Emma in print to modest acclaim. After her early death at forty-one, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion were published posthumously.
The characters that populate Austen’s six finished novels are easily overlaid with the real cultural milieu of Regency England. The landed gentry were a privileged social class, made up mostly of landowners, and their families, who could live entirely off rental income. Incumbent members of the aristocracy, these individuals ranked just below titled nobility. But as inheritance passed through primogeniture, with the majority of land, cash, and stocks going to the oldest sons, it was common for younger sons and daughters to seek to intermarry with those of title.
Thus the romantic landscape that Austen forged is one in which leisure is abundantly enabled. While her characters may struggle to maintain a certain level of wealth or standing in society, they are never without a housemaid or a cook. Even her poorest heroine, Fanny Price in Mansfield Park, still has a wealthy uncle with an estate in Northamptonshire, and the richest, Emma Woodhouse of Emma, is the mistress of a house which realistically could have employed ten or even fifteen servants. While domestic workers receive only passing mention in Austen’s work, her narratives could hardly exist without them. After all, who has time to ruminate, pine, or rue when one’s stomach is only half-full? Who has time for a love match when there is washing to be done?
In order for Austen to effectively explore the relationships between her characters in the way that she wills, they must be free from the torments of material considerations and constraints. They must be allowed to host balls, gossip, and fall in love without the underlying dread of potential job loss or surprise medical bills. At least for the women, there must be nothing better to do than get married.
As modern readers of Austen, we find ourselves suddenly bequeathed with all the time and money we need to focus on what matters, which is, of course, rich people going to each other’s houses. When we encounter opportunities for leisure, whether it’s the Netherfield ball in Pride and Prejudice or Frank Churchill’s four-hour round-trip journey for a haircut in Emma, we are able to greet them with a wink and a nod, because we have escaped into a story where we, too, have time to spare. This subtle distinction between free time—hours that are unbound—and spare time—hours that were never bound in the first place—is important, because while “free” implies choice, “spare” implies excess. And is there not more freedom in excess than in choice?
***
I created my first farm in Stardew Valley a few months after reading Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. In the blockbuster novel, main characters Sam Masur and Sadie Green—“often in love but never lovers”—meet for the first time in the game room of a pediatric hospital, and there they spend their first 609 hours together in front of the Nintendo Entertainment System. Long after I shelved the story, I found myself captivated by the centrality of play in their relationship. So after considering the options on the “cozy games” market—a genre marked by non-violent, soothing settings—I decided to try my hand at a farm life sim (short for “simulation”) with pleasing graphics and no singular objective.
Developed by Eric “Concerned Ape” Barone, Stardew Valley follows a character who abandons their cubicle for the countryside after inheriting their grandfather’s farm. I designed my avatar to look like me, blond-haired and blue-eyed, dressed in a black skirt and a pink bow. Her name is my name.
For my first sixty hours of gameplay, I resisted entreaties from friends to consult the Stardew Valley Wiki. I didn’t want to be good at Stardew; I had no desire to build and manage the perfect community. I didn’t even start planting crops until mid-summer rolled around, and even then it was only a concession to my real-life boyfriend, who told me quite pointedly, “It’s Stardew Valley. You have to farm.”
So I bought blueberry and melon seeds from Pierre’s General Store. I learned the names of the villagers, and I befriended them. I decided to marry Maru, the brilliant daughter of carpenter Robin and biologist Demetrius, who liked robots, Prismatic Shard, and tinkering with tools, because she seemed creative and interesting and she was nice to me. On the Wednesday morning after our wedding, she hugged me sweetly, and a bubbly heart icon appeared over our heads.
“I got up early and watered some crops for you,” she told me. “I hope it makes your job a little easier today.”
This dialogue—written by Barone, as all dialogue in Stardew was—made me feel warm, affirmed in my choice. It didn’t matter if the same speech bubble would have appeared regardless of which of the twelve eligible bachelors or bachelorettes I’d taken for a spouse. In this sim, Maru was my wife, and when I was kind to her, she was kind to me in return. I accepted that this pleasantness was only made possible by the privilege of my inheritance, and I carried on.
As the sole creator of Stardew Valley, Barone wore every hat in the game-making process: he crafted the narrative, created the pixel art, wrote the code, and composed the music. He wanted to create a world that was whimsical, warm, and intimate, so instead of relying on grind mechanics, whereby the player completes repetitive tasks to improve game state, he designed with an emphasis on self-determination. In Stardew, you don’t have to eat to live—but this somehow makes cooking more fun. You don’t have to mine to make money—but if you get roughed up looking for Fire Crystal, a concerned villager is always nearby to help. Gameplay is open-ended, and there are many pathways to success. Much like the safety to be found in Jane Austen novels, Stardew Valley offers players the opportunity to see what choices they would make if there was only so far to fall.
***
When I read Pride and Prejudice for the first time at fourteen, I didn’t think it was inevitable that Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy would end up together, even though I was desperate for them to do so. Fully able to suspend certainty that true love would win in the end, I sat in on the gossip, eyes racing along the pages to find out who would do what, and with whom, and to what end. One day people in my English classes would scoff about how predictable Austen’s storylines were, how silly and starry-eyed you’d have to be to find something surprising in any of her work. But fortunately for me, that disillusionment was still years down the line. I loved watching rich people shoot the shit, full stop.
After I finished Pride and Prejudice, I worked my way through Sense and Sensibility, which follows two of the Dashwood sisters, the prudent Elinor and the vivacious Marianne, in the four years after their father’s death. According to the law of primogeniture, the family estate passes to their half-brother, whose wife effectively evicts them. This prompts Elinor and Marianne, along with their mother and youngest sister, to move into a modest cottage on the property of a distant relative. Though not destitute, they are forced to live on a far smaller income than when their father was alive.
This financial instability, akin to being drop-kicked to the bottom of the one-percent, serves as the backdrop for the coming-of-age of two very different sisters. In comparing Elinor and Marianne, I naturally sought to determine, as a teenage girl just two hundred years later, which of their personality traits it would make sense for me to adopt. Elinor “had an excellent heart;—her disposition was affectionate, and her feelings were strong; but she knew how to govern them.” Marianne was “sensible and clever; but eager in everything; her sorrows, her joys, could have no moderation. She was generous, amiable, interesting: she was everything but prudent.” As I soaked up their parallel love stories, it became clear that while their money woes were useful as a plot device, their standing in society still offered them the privilege to self-explore. Any deficiency in one sister’s character was compensated for by the other, suggesting that the ideal woman was a sort of mélange of reason and emotion. Thematically, this contrast only remained relevant because they still had enough financial freedom—just less of it than before. They couldn’t afford new dresses at the same rate they procured them in the past, but they would still never have to work.
As I worked my way through the rest of Austen’s bibliography, I found myself asking the same questions over and over again. What skills had these characters acquired that enabled them to live lives that center around love, around community, around conversation? Fanny Price and Catherine Morland were well-read, Emma Woodhouse was beautiful and charming, and Anne Elliott navigated complex social situations with grace. But the secret to their eventual happinesses wasn’t their ability, or lack thereof, to sing, dance, elocute, or empathize. After many careful readings, I determined that in domestic fantasy, there was simply an abundance of choice—and enough time to taste the whole rainbow.
***
“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”
Such was the opinion of Henry Tilney, the love interest of Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey. It’s an oft-touted quote among Austen fans, reprinted on teacups and crew socks and totes in museum gift shops the world over. But while the comment served to ingratiate Henry with Catherine (and with Austen’s readers), the truth is that in 1800, only sixty percent of men and forty percent of women in England and Wales were literate. Changes in education law—which primarily impacted the working class—and the popularity of church-ran Sunday schools worked to close this gap by the end of the century, when literacy rates across genders rose to about ninety-seven percent. In the Regency era, however, it simply was not possible for many men and women to sign their names on marriage registers, let alone read novels. But of course, Henry was only scoffing at other “gentlemen” and “ladies.”
Anthropologists have found that while hunter-gatherers typically worked less than people in complex societies, the advent of farming brought about a marked increase in daily labor and responsibilities, from fieldwork and animal husbandry to household management and social organization. But it wasn’t until the invention of coinage around 600 BCE that time began to function as a commodity—or that it could even be thought of as something to sell. By the Middle Ages, typical serfs still only worked dawn to dusk about twenty or thirty days per year. Otherwise, they worked a few hours here and there or, on feast days, not at all.
With the rise of industrial (and eventually post-industrial) societies, the distinction between work and play grew more defined, and leisure became a privilege restricted to the upper class. The productivity benefits of automation did not lead to a fifteen-hour workweek, as predicted by economist John Maynard Keynes in 1930, but instead to the expansion of the administrative and managerial sectors in the Global North and the outsourcing of industrial and manufacturing labor to the Global South. In the mid-2020s—in the age of AI—a society in which most people only work a couple hours per week is more conceivable than ever. Unfortunately, corporations and governments are experts at bloat.
Ours might not be the darkest timeline, but it’s certainly not the best and brightest. As new generations come of age and begin to grapple with the unfairness of the status quo, it’s only natural that we begin to resent the institutions that require us to be at work, when we could be at home or at rest. As anthropologist David Graeber noted in his 2018 book Bullshit Jobs, “Sitting around in cafés all day arguing about politics or gossiping about our friends’ complex polyamorous love affairs takes time (all day, in fact)” but things like exercise, shopping, and watching television “can all be placed in the kind of self-contained predictable time-slots one is likely to have left over between spates of work, or else while recovering from it.” In other words, we trade our time to the workplace dragon because we have to—in order to make money, in order to live. But for much of our waking life, we are unhappy.
Barring a revolution, we will never have access to that hypothetical world where we do only useful labor and are free to enjoy the rest of our time on Earth. Because livelihood is so attached to work, we learn to esteem professional ambition and luxury goods and deprioritize things like community well-being and creative hobbies. Over time, this leads us to discount certain pursuits we once enjoyed, which in turn affects the way our personalities, interests, and values develop. Unless one works in film, it’s easy to see watching movies as a waste of time—but perhaps if we had time to waste, we wouldn’t. Perhaps we would be able to reclaim the value in our own enjoyment.
The forces that enable leisure in Stardew Valley and Jane Austen novels mirror real-life authorities: inheritance and succession, access to natural spaces, exposure and admittance to creative pursuits, social safety nets. But unlike in these fictional realms, not even money or power is enough to protect us from the hamster wheel of modern work culture. To cope, we often turn to escapism, at which point we are presented with two options. There is adventure fantasy, of course, but sometimes the disillusioned lack the energy to suspend disbelief. Domestic dramas, on the other hand, function as a reasonable simulacrum of reality. The absence of grind mechanics allows us to rest our riddled minds, if only for a moment or so. With the time we manage to steal back from the dragon, we shrug our shoulders, relieving them of an urgent, outermost tension, and relax our collective brow.
Ireland Headrick is an MFA candidate in nonfiction at the University of Montana. Her work has previously appeared in the Michigan Quarterly Review, Cape Fear Living, and Second Story Journal. She currently lives between western Montana and Brooklyn, New York.