The Other Bennet Sister

If you are working on Pride or Prejudice with your LLCER pupils, or if you're just a Jane Austen fan, look out for a new BBC series about the middle Bennet sister, Mary, coming next year. And coming much sooner, our Reading Guide to accompany your students will be available on 21 November.

Of the five Bennet sisters, Austen spends the least time and care over Mary. She is mentioned all of 37 times in the novel, compared to over 700 for the heroine Elizabeth. Where the other sisters are paired off — Jane and Elizabeth the two stars of the family and close although they have very different temperaments; Lydia the loud and reckless risktaker who pulls Kitty along in her wake — Mary prefers to isolate herself studying and reading.

Austen dismisses her in a few acidic lines:
"After a song or two, and before [Elizabeth] could reply to the entreaties of several that she would sing again, she was eagerly succeeded at the instrument by her sister Mary, who having, in consequence of being the only plain one in the family, worked hard for knowledge and accomplishments, was always impatient for display.

"Mary had neither genius nor taste; and though vanity had given her application, it had given her likewise a pedantic air and conceited manner, which would have injured a higher degree of excellence than she had reached." (Chapter 6)

Rescuing Mary
In a world where one of a woman's main assets is her beauty, Mary's plain face leaves her destined to be ignored (similarly to Charlotte Brontë's heroine Jane Eyre). But author Janice Hadlow decided to imagine a different future for her.

In The Other Bennet Sister, the 2020 novel on which the BBC series will be based, she reviews the events of Pride and Prejudice from Mary's point of view before going on to picture her after the novel closes. We are told in Austen's final round-up that Mary is the only sister still at home, with Jane, Elizabeth and Lydia married and Kitty spending most of her time at her sisters' houses. Therefore inevitably, Hadlow reasons, when Mr Bennet dies and Mr Collins inherits Longbourn thanks to the entail, Mary would find herself homeless, much as Jane Austen, her mother and her sister Cassandra did after Mr Austen's death. But this becomes an opportunity as Mary becomes a guest at her sister's houses and especially, and most happily, with her aunt and uncle the Gardiners. This allows her to travel and pushes her out of her shell.

The BBC series should start filming soon, with the aim of being released in 2025 to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the hugely popular TV mini-series of Pride and Prejudice with Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth which also inspired Bridget Jones's Diary.