Poor Mary Bennet. The plain, bookish one in Pride and Prejudice, delighting us long enough. But, as Alice McVeigh reflects, the many reimaginings of Mary’s story demonstrate the curious allure she holds for so many of us.
The late, great Hilary Mantel was already scribbling her own Mary Bennet novel when she died. Janice Hadlow’s version of the Mary Bennet story, The Other Bennet Sister, is soon to get the full-on, 10-part BBC adaptation treatment. And the mega-seller Colleen McCullough’s The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet still sells like regency shoe roses just before a ball. Even though she rather cheated by making ‘her’ Mary yet another Bennet beauty.
And these three represent only the most visible tip of the Mary Bennet iceberg. Mary’s appeal far exceeds her sisters’ – all except for Lizzy herself. At last count there was a list of almost 60 books starring the plainest Bennet sister on Goodreads alone.
The range of what’s on offer is equally prodigious. There’s a sexed-up Harlequin – of course – along with books featuring Mary-as-witch, Mary-as-apprentice-magician, Mary-as-amateur-sleuth – and even a Mary Bennet, Spy. In novel after novel, Mary has ‘a secret life’, ‘takes charge’, or ‘does down the baddies’.
Her love life, too, has taken a sudden turn for the better. She’s paired off with Mr Collins – at long last, some will suggest; with a musician, a scientist, a poet, even with Colonel Fitzwilliam. (Have to confess that, in my own Darcy, she falls for Master Lucas, who teases her out of her pedantry.) Intriguingly, in some few novels Mary achieves a strikingly modern, very ‘non-Regency’ independence.
So. What’s the source of her unlikely appeal?
First, a (fairly) blank slate is always encouraging to an author. I know, for example, several at this moment busily penning tales about the faceless Margaret, the Dashwood’s unpromising third sister, aged only 13 in Sense and Sensibility. And this even though her own creator wrote her off, observing that Margaret “was a good-humoured, well-disposed girl; but as she had already imbibed a good deal of Marianne’s romance, without having much of her sense, she did not, at thirteen, bid fair to equal her sisters at a more advanced period of life.”
Ouch.
Mary Bennet has more presence in Pride and Prejudice than Margaret in Sense and Sensibility – but not by much. The plain one. The bookish one. The unselfconscious one. The ‘pedantic’ one. The one whose love for music is notably unrequited.
Even her very last appearance in the novel is almost cruelly dismissive. After Austen permits us hope on young Kitty’s behalf – she grows less fretful upon spending much time with her two eldest sisters – she describes poor Mary as probably submitting “without much reluctance” to mixing more in society. Why? Due to being “no longer mortified by comparisons of her sisters’ beauty and her own”.
Ouch, again. In Austen’s view, at least, Mary is far from heroine material.
But then, nor are we. The second reason for her appeal might well be fellow feeling. Pride and Prejudice aficionados must be bookish, by definition, so bookishness attracts us, even if not always considered as desirable in the early 1800s.
And most people, in every era, doubt their own self-worth in terms of both learning and looks – perhaps women especially. How many women of your acquaintance confidently view themselves as being as brilliant as Lizzy or as irresistible as Jane? It’s far easier to relate to the ordinary-looking, somewhat clever if occasionally sententious, Mary Bennet.
Perhaps we even empathise with her awkwardnesses, her frankly underwhelming social graces. To console her, we allow her to transform herself into a dashing surgeon or apprentice magician, to solve complicated murder mysteries or to fearlessly repel aliens, freed from a world in which – lacking looks, money and any serious claim to accomplishment – she’s written off as a hopeless spinster.
Many readers too must be, like Mary, middle children – traditionally garnering less attention than the eldest and less indulgence than the youngest. The trope is reinforced in Austen’s original not only by Mr Bennet’s clear preference for Lizzy and Jane, but by his wife’s equally determined partiality for young Lydia.
The middling Mary is also a loner: uncomfortably sandwiched between the deep understanding enjoyed by Lizzy and Jane and the ‘gruesome twosome’ later in the birth order. She seems often omitted from trips, left to practise her music alone, or to read a book – by choice or not.
Third, Janeites probably wish to rescue Mary from the gentle bullying she is subjected to. We enjoy Mr Bennet’s witticisms at her expense but can’t really condone them. It’s clear that Mary lacks not only a sister-partner but – in large measure – parental support.
For the same reason, some part of us longs to gift her the agency she so obviously lacks. The very title of AL Ward’s The Wallflower’s Revenge: or The Coming of Age of Mary Bennet is telling in this regard. There’s also more than a touch of feminist sensibility in those Mary Bennet spinoffs where she stars as a sleuth or excels as a midwife – perhaps most of all in those in which she remains single, and fiercely independent. In the memes featuring Mary in social media there’s sometimes more than a suggestion of Mary’s revenge.
In the famous Pride and Prejudice adaptations, Mary Bennet (as a character) is denigrated, if not omitted altogether. The 1980 adaptation mostly ignores her. The 1995 BBC epic gleefully cuts straight from her tuneless singing to a howling dog. True, she swipes a moment of comic glory in Gurinder Chadha’s Bride and Prejudice, but this is rare.
Even her own creator dissed her. According to James Edward Austen-Leigh (A Memoir of Jane Austen) Austen confided to family members that, in her imagination, “Mary obtained nothing higher than one of her uncle Phillips’s clerks and was content to be considered a star in the society of Meryton.”
Not a terrible outcome for a young Regency woman – certainly better than most. But still, pretty poor fun compared to the glories of Pemberley laid out for Lizzy’s delectation, the delightful Netherfield-in-the-north that the Bingleys purchase, or even Kitty’s improved chances of consequent elevation.
Of course, we inevitably read older authors through 21st-century eyes. It could be that, in reaction to all the nerves and strife of planet Earth in 2024, Austenites have turned soft-hearted and woolly-minded, with a preference for unanimous wedding scenes and Happily Ever Afters.
However, I prefer to think that Austenesque writers have better reasons to reclaim the ‘other’ Bennet sister, and to turn Mary into the kind of heroine not even her creator ever imagined she could be.
Pride and Perjury by Alice McVeigh was published on 30 May, 2024. It’s a short story collection, nine of which are Pride and Prejudice-inspired.
Alice’s Austenesque series of standalone novels have been honoured at the 2024 London Book Fair in the UK Selfie Awards and as runners-up for Foreword Indies’ Book of the Year 2022 and Editors’ Picks in Publishers Weekly. Her series won First Place in Chanticleer International Book Series Awards 2023.
You may also enjoy:
Bringing Jane Austen to life by Jessica Bull
How Victorian literature helped me write my debut novel by Katie Lumsden
Female sexuality in historical fiction by Lesley McDowell
Review: Sanditon by Naomi Clifford
Images:
- Farmer Giles and His Wife Showing Off Their Daughter Betty to Their Neighbours on her Return from School (detail) by James Gilray, 1809: Metropolitan Museum of Art (public domain)
- Portrait of a young lady, seated small three-quarter-length, before a fireplace, attrib Adele Romany: Picryl (public domain)
- Singing to the Reverend by Edward Leighton, 1896: Wikimedia (public domain)
- The Bennet family at home, illustration for Pride and Prejudice by Hugh Thomson, c1894: Wikimedia (public domain)
- Cover of BBC Pride and Prejudice VHS: Wikimedia (fair use)
