About the most forgettable Bennet sister and a retelling of Pride and Prejudice…
“There are few people whom I really love, and still fewer of whom I think well. The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it; and every day confirms my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters, and of the little dependence that can be placed on the appearance of merit or sense.”
I just finished watching the newest season of Bridgerton and like any reasonably conditioned reader of Victorian romances, I was naturally reminded of the archetype that shaped my womanhood. Yes, I’m talking about Pride and Prejudice.
There is, of course, Mr. Darcy. There is always Mr. Darcy. The timelessness of his charm and chivalry, his awkward nobility and love made millions and billions of women’s hearts flutter across generations. But to reduce Austen to Darcy is unfair.
Because we have the brilliant Elizabeth Bennett. Witty, observant, and ruthlessly precise.
“From the very beginning— from the first moment, I may almost say— of my acquaintance with you, your manners, impressing me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain of the feelings of others, were such as to form the groundwork of disapprobation on which succeeding events have built so immovable a dislike; and I had not known you a month before I felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry.”
Slightly better than throwing a brick at him.
What kind of an Ironist are You?
And then there are the sisters. Such a well-written bunch that your heart spoke for each and your thirsty reader mind wanted to know the HEAs (happily ever afters) of each of their lives. Where Jane was generous, Lydia was reckless. Kitty impressionable and Mary the misfit duckling of the lot. But right at the beginning of the novel, unnoticed by most, Mary says something profound (and a bit preachy, I must admit)-
“Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.”
Now, most readers of Pride and Prejudice remember Mary Bennett as the middle of the five Bennett sisters and the plain awkward one, the only one who is not considered pretty. Perhaps partly because of this, she cultivates a reputation for learning and seriousness, reading extensively, making moral pronouncements, and acting pedantic by quoting from philosophical texts. She also fancies herself a musician and singer, though Austen makes it clear that she has more enthusiasm than talent. We all remember that painful scene at the Netherfield ball where Mr. Bennet has to signal her to stop performing.
According to A Memoir of Jane Austen, Mary married one of her Uncle Philips’s law clerks and moved into Meryton with him. Janice Hadlow writes about this sister in her novel The Other Bennet Sister, giving Mary an interiority as she steps out of the margins.
An ardent fan of fictional worlds, I enjoyed revisiting familiar Austen territory in the first half of the book, but this time through Mary’s acute self-awareness. We see the same dances and Longbourne drawing rooms, but now through self-conscious Mary who is bookish, gauche, and painfully overlooked. Always speaking a little too much and trying really hard to belong.
What I loved most about this perspective though is that it isn’t just a rewrite of Pride and Prejudice. Hadlow (former BBC executive) extends the story to include what happens once her sisters are settled. The fact that she is sandwiched between two pairs of sisters – Jane and Elizabeth are close, and Kitty and Lydia are close – leaves her isolated. This is perhaps where her bookishness and moralizing tendencies come from – in a bid to carve out a niche when she cannot compete on social charm or physical beauty.
Just when Mary is left without property and fortune, an invitation from Charlotte Collins draws her back to her childhood home. After a few false starts, we see her slow-burn growth, as she finds love and acceptance in Aunt Gardiner’s house in London where her self-worth and confidence slowly start growing. In one of these deeply satisfying scenes, we see her eventually attracting the attention of two suitors and turning the tables on Caroline Bingley.
Fans of Longbourne (P&P from the servants’ POV) and Wide Sargasso Sea (bringing Jane Eyre’s madwoman to the fore) would find much to appreciate here. Even as Bridgerton is trying to expand the Austen-era lens in its fourth season to bring up invisible characters to the fore, I found this book did a decent job of elevating the side character into a strong intelligent heroine in her own right. In The Other Bennett Sister, the author cuts past romance to something more difficult —
“The most important habit to conquer was the habit of misery itself. Nothing was so inimical to happiness as the settled conviction it was not for her. It was a conviction that ran very deep in her; but she knew she must fight to rise above it.”
“…There are times when happiness must be fought for, if we are to have any chance at all of achieving it.”
I didn’t think I would actually get invested in Mary but I found that the more I read, the more it went beyond being just a classic retelling or mere fan fiction. If you love stories about underestimated characters finding their footing, you will find this one quite moving and it might even just send you back to P&P for a fresh reread. Among all the things in the book, what stayed with me most was –
“True beauty…had nothing to do with outward appearance. It came from within, the product of a well-regulated mind and a properly formed understanding. These qualities, and not a pretty face, are the real measure of a woman’s worth.”
