The Other Bennet Sister by Janice Hadlow
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The Other Bennet Sister
By Janice Hadlow
Henry Holt, 2020
It’s probably understandable that the character of Mary Bennet in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice should attract the imagination of readers, since Mary Bennet is infamously a reader herself, albeit the unfortunate kind who are fond of canting their favorite ‘improving’ quotations at the worst possible moments. Even the most die-hard Janeites hardly need a re-read to notice that the other Bennet girls aren’t exactly bookworms; Jane and Elizabeth are gorgeous and insightful, Catherine and Lydia are high-spirited and coquettish, but only Mary would have been likely to know her way around the Meryton subscription library.
It ought to make her sympathetic, especially to readers. But Jane Austen intervenes: she makes sure to portray Mary Bennet as one of the book’s most repellant characters, as pompous and tone-deaf as Mr. Collins without even offering the faint hope he represents for saving Longbourn. Whether Austen is using Mary as a mannequin to mock poor readers or whether she’s using Mary to lampoon some private irritant in her own life (or - my money - both), she’s doing her best to make sure readers dislike Mary enough to guarantee they have no sympathy for her inevitable fate as an old maid.
Even someone unfamiliar with the bristling history of Pride and Prejudice pastiche fiction will see immediately that all this should make Mary Bennet irresistible to rewriters. And this has happened: with the possible exception of stories detailing just how miserable Elizabeth and Darcy end up being, stories attempting to rescue Mary Bennet from Jane Austen’s hands have been perhaps the most popular pastiche-fodder of them all. This is the story of Janice Hadlow’s debut novel The Other Bennet Sister, which obeys the first rule of Pride and Prejudice pastiche fiction by rolling out its own reflection of that novel’s opening line:
It is a sad fact of life that if a young woman is unlucky enough to come into the world without expectations, she had better do all she can to ensure she is born beautiful. To be poor and handsome is misfortune enough; but to be penniless and plain is a hard fate indeed.
As readers of books like Jo Baker’s Longbourn or any of Linda Berdoll’s wonderful novels will know, one challenge in this kind of writing is incorporating the characters of Austen’s novel into new interpretations without violating any of the sacred lines of canon. When a pastiche novel overlaps with events from Pride and Prejudice itself, as half of Hadlow’s novel does, quotes and scenes are locked in place and can only be mitigated or enhanced by new scenes added specifically to change the shape of the narrative. In the case of The Other Bennet Sister, readers learn early that Mary, doubting her viability in the marriage market, approaches her mother with the horrifying proposition that she be offered to Mr. Collins if Jane and Elizabeth reject him. And as bad as such a fate would be, Hadlow skillfully moves the little scene into even more chilling territory. Mrs. Bennet scorns even the offer and storms off, leaving Mary alone with a moment of unwanted but important personal clarity:
Mrs. Bennet’s words shocked her very much. She knew her mother had no hopes she would make a marriage of the kind she dreamt of for her other daughters; but Mary had not realised until now how little she featured in her mother’s plans at all. Nothing, it seemed, was to be done for her. She was unworthy of any consideration, not fit even to serve as a consolation prize to a disappointed man. If proof had been needed that Charlotte [Lucas] was right when she insisted a young woman must unflinchingly pursue her own best interests, she had surely received it this morning.
Readers worried that such a moment might embitter Mary, might turn her into a vaguely calculating creature like Charlotte Lucas, will smile with relief when Hadlow moves her story to London and Mary’s association to the Gardiners, those unsung heroes of Pride and Prejudice. Mary herself is still socially hopeless - as she herself observes, when she’s silent she confirms the opinion of her dullness, but when she tries to entertain, she always strikes the wrong note - but when she leaves Longbourn she also leaves Jane Austen, and the novel promptly begins to breathe.
The portrait that flows from this is a multi-faceted and decidedly cheering one. Hadlow echoes the wit and surprising heft of Jane Austen’s prose without ever stooping to simple imitation, and, amazingly, she manages to create her own versions of some of the most famous characters in English literature. Mary Bennet has as many post-novel futures as there are readers, but The Other Bennet Sister gives those readers one to cherish against all others.
—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.