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The Other Bennet Sister by Janice Hadlow review – what happened to Mary after Pride and Prejudice

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/11/the-other-bennet-sister-janice-hadlow-review

Plain, awkward Mary steps out of her siblings’ shadow in this engaging addendum to Austen

Janice Hadlow’s first novel explores the predicament of Mary, the overlooked middle daughter of the Bennet household in Pride and Prejudice. Mary doesn’t have a story of her own in Austen’s novel – she’s there to serve as a foil to her sisters’ charm, and a temporary obstacle to their happiness. Bookish and gauche, Mary is the one who can be relied on to give an ill-judged performance on the pianoforte or deliver a sententious comment at exactly the wrong moment. By the end of the novel her circumstances have changed, but she has not; she’s still just as plain and awkward as she ever was, but with her sisters variously settled elsewhere, she is at least “no longer mortified by comparisons between her sisters’ beauty and her own”.

In The Other Bennet Sister, Mary begins very much as Austen depicted her – plain, awkward, overlooked – but she is now our protagonist. With this shift of focus, our sympathies shift too. We find ourselves flinching with and for, but no longer because of Mary. We come to understand what has made her the way she is. From girlhood, she has been mortified by her mother, who constantly evaluates her five daughters’ looks, and finds only Mary’s wanting. Her father, too, is a source of grief; she is desperate to be close to him, but he makes a pet of Lizzie, and only seems to speak to Mary – Hadlow is quoting Austen here – in put-downs. Her sisters exist in fixed pair-bonds: Jane-and-Lizzie, Kitty-and-Lydia; Mary is left to drift alone. Teased, belittled and criticised, it is no wonder she is so ill at ease; no wonder she blunders.

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