The Albion Courier, Features Desk 

[Elizabeth Bennet, Member of the House of Resources for Longbourn Mining Company, agreed to speak with the Courier via video conference. The resulting article has been lightly edited for length.] 

There are Members of the House of Resources who treat their Parliamentary seat as a burden, a necessary inconvenience attached to their family business. Elizabeth Bennet is not one of them. 

She is younger than you expect, dark-haired with lively brown eyes. She gives you her full attention without ever giving you the impression that she has forgotten you are a journalist. She answers questions directly and completely, and somehow by the end of the interview you find yourself with a thorough understanding of Longbourn Mining Company’s public position on every matter of policy and very little idea what Elizabeth Bennet thinks about any of it personally. It is, in its way, an impressive performance. She would almost certainly object to that word. 

The House of Resources 

A note for readers unfamiliar with the structure of Albion’s Parliament: the House of Resources is not the House of Commons. Members of the House of Commons represent the residential populations of Albion’s asteroids. Members of the House of Resources represent their asteroid’s primary owners, which on the frontier of Albion Space almost always means a mining operation. The two chambers share a building and a considerable amount of procedural friction. 

Elizabeth Bennet holds Longbourn’s seat in the House of Resources, a position that makes her simultaneously a company representative, a de facto diplomat for her asteroid’s population, and one of the younger voices in a chamber that tends to move slowly. She has held the seat for three years. She does not appear to find it limiting. 

“The work matters,” she says, when asked why someone of her evident abilities chose Parliamentary service over other options. “Longbourn’s future depends on decisions made in that chamber. It seemed more useful to be in the room than to watch from outside it.” 

She says this with a cheerful smile which seems to include you in some private joke without explaining it. She moves on before you can ask a follow-up question. 

Longbourn Mining Company 

Longbourn is not the largest mining operation in the Hector-Sabrina family, nor the most technologically advanced. What it is, by most accounts, is resilient: a mid-sized operation with diversified extraction across iron, water ice, and radioisotope deposits, family-owned across multiple generations, and possessed of a reputation for meeting its contracts. 

The company is run, in the sense that anyone runs it, by Mr. Bennet, whose management style is a matter of some fascination among the closer observers of Belt business. He is, by his daughter’s careful account, a man of considerable brains who focuses those brains on the exploration and development of Longbourn’s resources. Longbourn has survived on the strength of good initial claims, good advice, and the kind of institutional memory that accumulates when a family stays in one place long enough. 

Whether it will continue to thrive is a question Elizabeth Bennet answers with the smoothness of someone who has answered it before. “Longbourn has been here for six generations,” she says. “As long as there is an Albion, there will be a Longbourn.” 

She does not mention the financial pressures that Belt observers know the company has faced in recent years. Neither, pointedly, do we. 

The Bennet Family 

The Bennets are, by Elizabeth’s account, a family of strong personalities and varied interests. She has one older brother and three younger sisters, a fact she mentions with the fond resignation of someone who has long since made her peace with it. 

Logistics Officer Jack Bennet, the eldest, is warmly spoken of and quietly left at that. The younger sisters, Lydia and Kitty in particular, earn a brief pause and a diplomatic observation that they are “finding their way.” Mary, the middle sister who manages significant portions of Longbourn’s financial operations, is described with the careful precision of someone choosing every word: “thorough,” “committed,” and “her own person.” 

Mrs. Bennet’s contribution to the family’s public profile is, by contrast, entirely unguarded. She can be seen on every video stream from Longbourn, and her flamboyant interior decorating is a by-word in certain circles. 

Elizabeth Bennet’s expression when her mother’s name is mentioned suggests she is aware of this. 

Charlotte Lucas 

Among Elizabeth Bennet’s closest associates is Charlotte Lucas, Member for Lucas Mining in the House of Resources, whose asteroid sits within cooperative distance of Longbourn. The two women came up through Parliament at roughly the same time and share, by all observable evidence, a mutual regard built on something more than professional convenience. 

“Charlotte is the most practically intelligent person I know,” Elizabeth says, and this time the warmth is entirely unguarded. “Parliament would be considerably less bearable without her.” 

It is the most unscripted thing she says in the entire interview. It is also, probably, the truest. 

On Being Profiled 

Near the end of our conversation, Elizabeth Bennet is asked whether she read the Courier’s recent profile of William Darcy, Marcher of the Last Repose. 

She says that she did. 

She is asked what she thought of it. 

“I thought it was very thorough,” she says, “given the constraints you were working under.” 

She smiles when she says it, and her eyes twinkle, as if at some private joke that she does not choose to explain. 

Pride & Planetoids is a space opera retelling of Pride and Prejudice, set among the asteroid families of the outer solar system. Elizabeth Bennet, Member for Longbourn, is one of its two protagonists.