The bookish sister, under-regarded in every film adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, is finally getting a new lease on life. A new BBC adaptation will pay special attention to Mary’s journey.
As The AV Club reported, “To commemorate the 30th anniversary of the beloved miniseries, the network has commissioned a new spin-off of Jane Austen’s novel called The Other Bennet Sister. Based on the book of the same name by Janice Hadlow, the series follows the adventures of Mary Bennet, the somewhat uptight and moralizing middle sister of the Bennet family.”
This is great news for Mary stans, who’ve been waiting centuries to see justice done to their favorite Regency grump. Ours has been a hard faith to keep. Not least because the author is the origin of all that Mary shade.
To name one of several snide dismissals, of her ball-killing piano concert Austen snidely wrote, “Mary’s powers were by no means fitted for such a display.” And of course one wonders why Jane didn’t have Mary and Mr. Collins hit it off, when the marriage stakes were so dire.
After all, they’ve gotta be the only two people in the world to share an affinity for Fordyce’s Sermons.
It’s true that in the original text, the middle Bennet sister is rendered as self-serious and pedantic. But she’s also the only one who likes to read, and the only one who scoffs openly at the superficial rites her marry-or-die social life demands.
Mary’s not the cool sister. She’s not the fun sister. She’s not the sweet sister. But she is principled and devoted. In these ways she has more in common with modernist heroes like Dorothea Brooke, or even a Daria Morgendorffer.
Her commitment to marching to the beat of her own metronome is especially heroic, given her precarious financial future.
The Mary phenomenon may be analogous to the Carrie/Miranda conundrum, in that the grumpier Ms. Bennet is probably the more realistic character. As the BBC noted, “While we dream of being Lizzy, in reality most us are more like Mary.”
Hadlow’s novel likewise engages this kind of reparative reading, but it also “gives Mary Bennet the epic love story nobody predicted for her.” Which, cool. Though I’d be just as excited to read a book where my good sis malcontents around in the background, ruining balls forever.
It’s unclear which path the new series will take. Written by Sarah Quintrell and commissioned for the BBC with Cardiff-based indie Bad Wolf, the show will be released as a ten-part-drama. Dates TBD.
