If “Pride and Prejudice” is the most joyful and life-affirming of Jane Austen’s novels, then its great charm surely rests on the slender shoulders of the ineffable Elizabeth “Lizzy” Bennet. Lizzy and her four sisters — beautiful Jane, bookish Mary, impressionable Kitty and Lydia, a shameless flirt — are all on the Georgian marriage market. But it is the fearless Lizzy who jokes, teases and outsmarts the lesser mortals in her orbit, including the snobbish Lady Catherine de Bourgh and Mr. Collins, a witless clergyman. And it is Lizzy who, with the sheer force of her personality, eventually wins the proudslot10, rich and handsome Mr. Darcy.
Yes, Austen certainly knew what she was doing when she created Lizzy, who in a letter to her sister Cassandra she said was “as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print.”
What, then, would Austen have made of her modern readers’ more recent obsession with the middle Bennet sister, the plain and unremarkable Mary? Last month the BBC announced its plan for a 10-part drama, “The Other Bennet Sister,” which will be adapted from a novel by Janice Hadlow that explores the overlooked Mary’s predicament. “The Other Bennet Sister” is just the latest of a stream of reimaginings in recent decades, including “The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet,” by Colleen McCullough and “The Unexpected Miss Bennet,” by Patrice Sarath. There seems to be something about Mary Bennet that the modern reader can’t leave alone.
Austen is masterly on family relationships and sibling rivalry, and her minor characters are always drawn with supreme skill, but she casts a wickedly critical eye on Mary. Mary is vain but flails in her efforts at self-improvement. She is judgmental of those around her whom we suspect she secretly envies. She desperately wants to say the smart thing but can’t think of it in time. She repeats opinions she’s read as her own.
Could it be that we’re obsessed with her because she is all of us?
We first meet Mary in Chapter 2 of “Pride and Prejudice,” in a moment that’s indicative of the incessant teasing she endures from her family and, occasionally, her creator. “What say you, Mary?” asks her father, as the Bennets discuss the wealthy Mr. Bingley, who has just moved to the area. “For you are a young lady of deep reflection, I know, and read great books, and make extracts,” Mr. Bennet continues, acidly. Austen then inserts a barb of her own: “Mary wished to say something very sensible, but knew not how.”
Without the good looks and charms of her sister siblings, Mary is thrown upon her limited intellectual endowments and third-rate musical accomplishments. Her happy place is a library where she reads in solitude, perhaps wanting to feel closer to her bookish father, whose casual cruelty undermines her confidence.
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