At one point, Hornby’s Cassandra worries that Jane will offend their plain and sententious sister-in-law, Mary Austen, by calling the unlikably plain and sententious Bennet sister in Pride and Prejudice “Mary”. Janice Hadlow evidently also felt that Mary Bennet was given a rough deal by her author and in The Other Bennet Sister sets out to redress the balance, by retelling the events of Pride and Prejudice and their aftermath from Mary’s perspective. Mr. Gardiner and Mrs. Philips contribute to the progress and outcome of the story, but at levels reflecting their respective social standings. Being so focused on logic even convinces Mary to be willing to marry Mr. Collins as they seem they could get along with one another and not marry for love or care. But as we know in Austen’s original, he marries Miss Charlotte Lucas after being turned down by Lizzy. Mrs. Bennet hypocritically continues to put blame on Mary for this, and Mary wonders if she would end up a spinster in time. Maternal branch [ edit ] The three Gardiners from Meryton: Mrs. Philips, Mrs. Bennet, Mr. Gardiner. [17]

One by one, her sisters marry - Jane and Lizzy for love; Lydia for some semblance of respectability - but Mary, it seems, is destined to remain single and live out her life at Longbourn, at least until her father dies and the house is bequeathed to the reviled Mr Collins. Children [ edit ] Jane Bennet [ edit ] In a letter to Cassandra dated May 1813, Jane Austen describes a picture she saw at a gallery which was a good likeness of "Mrs. Bingley" – Jane Bennet. Deirdre Le Faye in Jane Austen: The World of Her Novels suggests that Portrait of Mrs. Q- is the picture that Austen described. [40]

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Graham, Peter (2008). Jane Austen & Charles Darwin: Naturalists and Novelists. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. ISBN 9780754658511. My weakness is I have a hard time resisting books associated with Jane Austen. But then the realization hits me that I already know those characters. Even though, Mary is a very interesting character and the writing is superb with wonderful sense of humor, it wasn’t enough for me. I think I’m expecting something new that would surprise me and it doesn’t come. In The Other Bennet Sister Mary is painted as the overlooked underdog (which fair enough, Hadlow wanted to give a reason why Mary seems so unappealing in Pride and Prejudice) who is constantly overshadowed by her sisters. The problem is...Mary is so self-pitying as to be completely unsympathetic. The first few chapters tell painfully slow and dull accounts of all the ways in which Mary has been mistreated by her family. She is plain, not very charming, and so unbearably sanctimonious. She actually believes that she is better than her sisters and is incredibly dismissive of their personalities, hobbies, and observations. Which...yeah, being bitter is fine but why be such a solipsistic whiner? Mary is constantly playing her own violin.

In London, Mary drastically grows in self-assurance. She understands that her dress helps her to be simple, elegant, and yet shows she is self-reliant. The house of her aunt and uncle is very lively and encouraging. She meets Mr. Hayward who, as a character, is a good balance between logic and emotion and encourages Mary to be less logical and more emotional through poetry.Wohlfeil, Markus; Whelan, Susan (2007). "Confessions of a Movie-Fan: Introspection Into a Consumer's Experiential Consumption of 'Pride & Prejudice' ". ACR European Advances. E-08. Some critics, however, point out that it would be unfair to see only her faults. Her obsession is justified by the family's situation: the cynicism of Mr Bennet will not prevent Mr Collins from inheriting Longbourn. She, at least, unlike her husband, thinks about the future of her daughters in seeking to place them socially, [34] (although it is just as likely that she anticipates being able to rely on them financially in the event of being left a widow). In an environment where there are numerous young ladies to be married (all neighboors, the Longs, the Lucases, have daughters or nieces to marry) and few interesting parties, she is much more attentive to the competition than her husband. [35] She does not neglect her daughters, while he merely treats them mostly as "stupid and ignorant as all the girls", and is shut selfishly in his library. [22]

However, Mr Collins is not assured of inheriting Longbourn, as he could be displaced by a son born either to Mrs Bennet or to a subsequent wife of Mr Bennet were Mrs Bennet to die and he to remarry. He cannot however be displaced by a son born to any of Mr Bennet's daughters, as the estate is entailed 'in the male line' i.e. to a son's son, son's son's son, etc., of whoever set the entail in place. The Other Bennet Sister is a transformative story told through the eyes of one of Pride and Prejudices most maligned characters. I am always hesitant to read a Pride and Prejudice sequel or retelling. I love Jane Austen and her books and can find fault with all the many attempts that try to take up the mantel of her characters. The Other Bennet Sister is therefore a surprising delight. The first part of the novel is a retelling of the events in Pride and Prejudice through the eyes of Mary, the middle Bennet sister. Alternately ignored or laughed at by her sisters and father; and constantly abused by her mother for her failure to be more like her sisters, Hadlow changes this one-dimensional character into one who elicits our sympathy and creates our hopes for her success. Hadlow doesn’t just re-create the scenes from the novel but enhances them through the sensibilities and actions of Austen’s minor characters.The very first sentence of this book drew me straight in. It had a nod to Pride and Prejudice which caught my attention but it is very much its own story which is what kept me reading. I loved the passing references to some of Jane Austen’s other novels (especially the discussion about muslin!) and I thought that Janice Hadlow had captured Austen’s tone well. Kindness, when she encounters it, is transformative. She has had a few precious moments of it in her early life, but her first experience of solid, steady kindness is in the Gardiner household. It’s a very different family dynamic from the one in which she grew up. Here, beauty is not the chief virtue in a woman; and a person’s warmth is of at least equal value to their wit. Mary can let down her defences here; she can become comfortably herself.

The familiar, beloved characters from the original stay strong and consistent. Mrs. Bennet suffers endlessly from her nerves and from daughters not taking her advice. Caroline Bingley is still a mean girl, and an expert at bitchy zingers just subtle enough to miss nearby men. I really enjoyed Charlotte giving Mary advice about marriage for plain women without a lot of money. We also get to see a bit more of the Gardiners. If you thought Mary, the nerdy, plain sibling in Pride & Prejudice, was too dull to warrant her own novel, think again: In Hadlow’s imaginative retelling, the sister with no prospects finally gets some respect—and perhaps even a guy.” Mary Bennet has already been the subject of many sequels and re-tellings (there is a great article on her character called There’s Something About Mary Bennet) but I don't think that Hadlow's vision of her is particularly compelling or improving. Mary also tries to be pious and high-minded; she seems to have assumed that assuming the moral high ground ("Far be it from me, my dear sister, to depreciate such pleasures. They would doubtless be congenial with the generality of female minds. But I confess they would have no charms for me – I should infinitely prefer a book"), she will be setting herself above her sisters, when she is always being compared to them. Another emphasised and systematically ridiculed aspect of Mrs Bennet is her " nervous disease" or rather her tendency to use her alleged nervous weakness to attract compassion to herself, or else demanding that the family dance attendance on her, but ultimately failing to make herself loved. [31] There are characters particularly concerned about their health in all the novels of Jane Austen; those hypochondriacs that she calls "poor honey" in her letters. [32] These egocentric characters who use their real or imagined ailments to reduce all to them, seem to be inspired by Mrs Bennet, whose complaints about her health [31] had the ability to irritate Jane, [33] who speaks with certain ironic annoyance about it in her letters to her sister. [note 1]The Other Bennet Mary Bennet is the middle (being around 18 years old at the beginning of the novel and 19 by the end), and the only plain and solemn Bennet sister. Like her two younger sisters, Kitty and Lydia, she is seen as 'silly' by Mr. Bennet, and not even pretty like her sisters and not 'good-humoured' (like Lydia) by Mrs. Bennet. Mary thinks of herself as being wise. Socially inept, Mary is more in the habit of moralising than conversing; rather than join in family activities, Mary mostly reads, plays music and sings, although she is often impatient to display her 'accomplishments' and is rather vain about them. She feels that having read books makes her an authority on those subjects. Mary is unaware of this fault, fancying herself to be intelligent, wise and accomplished; and this is likely to be the reason why her father considers her to be 'silly' like her mother and younger sisters, though more prim and sensible than them. With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair. The Other Bennet Sister opens when Mary Bennet is a young girl happy and content with herself and her life until slowly she becomes aware of a miserable truth. She’s plain and unattractive. Jane the pretty sister and Lizzy the witty favorite of their father’s pair off as they all get older, her father is entrenched in his library sanctum, and her mother laments Mary’s looks and hurls painful remarks to her and about her. Even her younger sisters take their cue from this to draw together and tease her when they do notice her. Mary searches for ways to please and be noticed though she works hard to avoid her mother who twits her on her looks or quiet manners.