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.
Hadlow takes up a handful of textual clues in Austen’s novel, and from them teases out Mary’s story, through childhood and early adolescence, the events of Pride and Prejudice, and then beyond, to Mr Bennet’s death, the Collinses’ possession of Longbourn, and then Mary’s straitened circumstances as a spinster sister, dependent on the uncertain hospitality of family and friends – the Bingleys, the Darcys, the Collinses, and her Aunt and Uncle Gardiner.
Although not suffering materially, Mary is emotionally starved; she refuses, however, to accept that this is her fate. Like Jane Eyre – with whom she has perhaps more in common than Austen’s own heroines – it turns out that her unassuming exterior contains a fierce, passionate soul, keen to find expression. Mary wants. She wants experience, friendship, love; like Jane Eyre, she will settle, if she must, for the life of the mind, but she won’t compromise her heart.
Hadlow’s empathy for Mary throws into sharp relief the brisk dismissiveness with which she was originally treated; in Pride and Prejudice, Austen pins her down with a couple of adjectives, invites the reader to find her ridiculous, and moves swiftly on. In The Other Bennet Sister, Mary herself seems almost aware of a change in dispensation as she emerges from the hermetically sealed environment of Pride and Prejudice, into the world beyond: “There was no one to judge her … she might change if she wished to.”
Kindness, when she encounters it, is transformative. She has had a few precious moments of it in her early life, but her first experience of solid, steady kindness is in the Gardiner household. It’s a very different family dynamic from the one in which she grew up. Here, beauty is not the chief virtue in a woman; and a person’s warmth is of at least equal value to their wit. Mary can let down her defences here; she can become comfortably herself.
In The Other Bennet Sister, Hadlow builds an immersive and engaging new version of a familiar world; her approach feels at once true to the source material and to life. In Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet, readers glimpse the person we might aspire to be – brilliant, beautiful, ending up with all the prizes – but in Hadlow’s Mary we recognise a more familiar figure: self-sabotaging, low on self-esteem, struggling to get through the day while others seem to sail effortlessly by. Hadlow’s great achievement is to shift our sympathies so completely that when happiness becomes a possibility for Mary, it’s difficult not to race through those final pages, desperate to know if she will, after all, be allowed – will allow herself – a happy ending.