In his 1986 study of theology and art, Real Presences, the philosopher George Steiner challenges us all to imagine a world without formal criticism. Instead, this imaginary society would be based on a “politics of the primary.” To critique a novel, one would have to write another novel that functions in dialogue with it.
When it comes to Jane Austen criticism, at least, Steiner was prescient. At times, it can feel as though the shelves of contemporary Austen novels, from modern reimaginings (Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary and Curtis Sittenfeld’s Eligible) to genre benders (P.D. James’s Death Comes to Pemberley) to political reinterpretations (Jo Baker’s Longbourn), outnumber books about Austen herself.
Enter The Other Bennet Sister, Janice Hadlow’s crack at the established subgenre of Austen reimagining: the Mary Bennet rehabilitation story. (Other entries include Colleen McCullough’s The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet, Jennifer Paynter’s The Forgotten Sister: Mary Bennet’s Pride and Prejudice, Eucharista Ward’s A Match For Mary Bennet: Can a Serious Young Lady Ever Find Her Way to Love?, and Pamela Mingle’s The Pursuit of Mary Bennet: A Pride and Prejudice Novel.) Like its compatriots, The Other Bennet Sister seeks to give Mary, the least likable of the Bennet sisters from Pride and Prejudice — she’s pedantic, plain, and socially awkward — her own voice and her own story.
As a regency romance, The Other Bennet Sister hits every necessary beat. There is polished, historically adjacent prose — redolent of the period without ever slipping into overly mannered Renaissance fair parody. There is a love triangle as our plucky heroine decides which of the several eligible men pursuing her is the right one to marry. And there is, of course, a happy ending. But as a response text to Austen, The Other Bennet Sister has little to offer beyond the expansion of what Marvel fans would call a cinematic universe.
One senses this lack of ambition from the first line: a perfunctory but revealing restating of Pride and Prejudice’s now overly familiar opener. “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.” Mary is not pretty. Her sisters are. She lives in a sexist society in which she is judged by her looks alone, and so, armed with a fondness for reading, an unflattering pair of spectacles, and a slightly anachronistic take on women’s liberation, Mary must make her own way in the world.
The problem is that there’s little that’s new, or that would’ve been new to Austen, in such an assessment. If anything, The Other Bennet Sister presents a world in which Mary’s plainness and bookishness hardly affect her life, given how many suitors she attracts in the course of the novel. And by ascribing all of Mary’s other less attractive (but far more interesting) qualities to the unjust circumstances of genetics, Hadlow misses the opportunity to give us a Mary who is bitter, perverse, and annoying but also richly rounded. Our few glimpses of an endearingly priggish Mary, as when she suggests that Lizzy stop reading novels because “they convey no proper instruction,” are consistently explained away by motives that in being so totally understandable become anodyne. (Mary is only priggish about reading because she hopes, futilely, to win her bookish father’s love.) Hadlow may be kinder to Mary than Austen is, but her kindness feels vague. Austen’s hawkish precision, at least, renders Mary, however irritating, fully human.
That’s not to say that Mary shouldn’t be carefully considered or reconsidered. (One of my favorite Austen reimaginings, Kelsey Hercs’s one-woman play Threadbare Morality, depicts the spinster Mary as a closeted lesbian, embracing her off-putting qualities precisely by imagining a rich and complex inner life for a woman for whom social awkwardness is the only way to fend off the gentleman callers who fill her with dread. But to reduce her story to a vague “personal growth” narrative (Aristotle’s maxim that happiness depends on ourselves, a recurrent motif in the book, is consistently reduced to a celebration of personal desires over social strictures) is to flatten rather than enrich her character.
When Hadlow gets specific, the novel gets far stronger. The most successful section of the novel by far is the rehabilitation not of Mary but of the odious social climber Mr. Collins, who unsuccessful wooed Lizzy in the original. Now wed (satisfactorily if not happily) to Mr. Collins, Charlotte Lucas is, as in Austen’s novel, resigned to a comfortable if emotionally hollow life: a dubious form of happy ending. But Mary, sympathizing with the bookish Collins, wonders what he feels about such an arrangement. “[Mary] had assumed the success of the Collins marriage could be judged by Charlotte’s sentiments alone. It had not occurred to her to consider Mr. Collins’s feelings in the matter. He had achieved his ambition of finding a respectable woman willing to marry him — surely that was enough? … It was not possible he had expected love?” Hadlow’s (and Mary’s) willingness to turn Austen’s narrative on its head, to explore the less-than-apparent loneliness of the gentleman that we can so easily dismiss as having been “settled for,” is at once moving in its own right and an arresting gloss on Austen’s text. If only Mary got the same treatment.
Tara Isabella Burton is a contributing editor at the American Interest, a columnist at Religion News Service, and the author of the forthcoming book Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World.
