The Other Bennet Sister by Janice Hadlow

So a quick overview, The Other Bennet Sister is the story of Mary Bennet, the middle Bennet sister from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Not a retelling, more like an off-shot. Janice Hadlow gives us the story of the ‘ugly duckling’ of the Bennet family.

If you’ve read (and loved) Pride and Prejudice, you might, like me, have some ‘opinions’ about Mrs Bennet. I understand all the nuance, and explanations as to why she is the way she is, she has five daughters and no security should Mr Bennet die. I totally get that, I even have a certain amount of sympathy for her. None of that excuses the fact that she is horrid in Pride and Prejudice, and even more horrid in this.

What was super interesting with this book was experiencing the other characters through Mary’s eyes. I feel like Janice Hadlow gave us a very true representation of all the Pride and Prejudice characters, but our narrator is very, very different from Lizzy. Mary just about broke my heart. I think her lack of self worth is a direct result of how her mother, and her father, treat her, and that informs how she thinks the rest of the world see her. It also informs how Mary decides to interact with the world. She reads only to improve her mind. She learns to be utterly proficient the pianoforte. When she tries to share these things with her family she is often met with scorn, and when she deviates from them, trying to make herself less rigid, she finds herself slapped back into place. Like how she was treated in relation to her performance at Netherfield.

I have to say, seeing the Bennet’s through Mary’s eyes, might taint them a little. I will always love Pride and Prejudice, and I’m a big Lizzy stan (she is a regency era badass) but I can totally see how someone like Mary, would feel lost, and often ostracised, in a family like the Bennet’s. One of the hardest parts of this book is seeing how Mary treats herself. She is so incredibly hard on herself and it’s a direct result of how her family as whole has treated her. Mrs Bennet is definitely the worst offender, but Mr Bennet also had a huge part to play. His ambivalence towards Mary was actually painful to read. How far he was from the man we see fully support Lizzy in Pride and Prejudice. We know from P&P that his favourite is Lizzy and he is more of an absent father to the rest of the girls, but it’s a different thing seeing that absence through Mary’s eyes.

The Pride and Prejudice timeline is only about 200 pages of this book, so me ranting so much about the Bennet’s is probably a little unfair, but how Mary’s family treat her early on, has a lot to do with how she moves through the world when away from them. Get away she does though, and that takes her to London and the Gardiner’s! Mr and Mrs Gardiner are even more wonderful in The Other Bennet sister. Mrs Gardiner in particular. She is kind, and patient, and Mary blossoms under her care. It was absolutely beautiful to read. The Gardiner’s open up Mary’s whole world, she finds herself, and as result she starts to see she is deserving of a HEA. The road to that HEA has the very lovely Tom Hayward, poetry, the awful Caroline Bingley, more than one proposal for our Mary, and a trip to the lake district. It’s a lovely journey, and I enjoyed every second.

The BBC has adapted this, and I have started watching. I love the castings, they did a great job with that, but they have changed some of the plot and I’m not loving those changes. I’ve only watched four episodes, and have six episodes to go, so it might surprise me.

Synopsis:

Mary, the bookish ugly duckling of Pride and Prejudice‘s five Bennet sisters, emerges from the shadows and transforms into a desired woman with choices of her own. 

What if Mary Bennet’s life took a different path from that laid out for her in Pride and Prejudice? What if the frustrated intellectual of the Bennet family, the marginalized middle daughter, the plain girl who takes refuge in her books, eventually found the fulfillment enjoyed by her prettier, more confident sisters? This is the plot of Janice Hadlow’s The Other Bennet Sister, a debut novel with exactly the affection and authority to satisfy Jane Austen fans. 

Ultimately, Mary’s journey is like that taken by every Austen heroine. She learns that she can only expect joy when she has accepted who she really is. She must throw off the false expectations and wrong ideas that have combined to obscure her true nature and prevented her from what makes her happy. Only when she undergoes this evolution does she have a chance at finding fulfillment; only then does she have the clarity to recognize her partner when he presents himself–and only at that moment is she genuinely worthy of love. 

Mary’s destiny diverges from that of her sisters. It does not involve broad acres or landed gentry. But it does include a man; and, as in all Austen novels, Mary must decide whether he is the truly the one for her. In The Other Bennet Sister, Mary is a fully rounded character–complex, conflicted, and often uncertain; but also vulnerable, supremely sympathetic, and ultimately the protagonist of an uncommonly satisfying debut novel.