August 19, 2025

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Let's start with the elephant in the room. In my opinion, Jane Austen is the foundational author of the English novel. Most people agree that her masterpiece is Pride and Prejudice, the story of Mrs. Bennet's effort to find husbands for her five daughters, all of them doomed to a life of poverty unless they can marry well -- meaning "wealthy."

Those who know either the novel or the several fine movie treatments of P&P remember Elizabeth, the second daughter and viewpoint character, and her older sister, Jane, whose complicated romances with Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy and Mr. Charles Bingley have occupied the minds (and hearts!) of generations of readers.

In addition, the scapegrace, selfish, heedless youngest daughter, Lydia, has infuriated those same readers, as she eventually ends up married to the profligate George Wickham. The fourth daughter, Kitty, exists as Lydia's cheerful and resentful puppet, barely a person in her own right.

But it is the middle daughter, Mary, who has always intrigued me, if only because she is such a distinct yet mysterious character. In a family where no governess has ever taken the girls' education in hand, Mary is the one dedicated scholar. She reads, she thinks, she plays piano with excruciating perfection, and she tries so hard to be good.

In P&P, we see that Mary is inevitably annoying. When her family is facing real dilemmas, you can always count on Mary to speak up with a quotation from some moralizing book of sermons -- always exactly to the point, because she has read a lot and remembers almost all, and always striking the most inappropriate pose for the situation at hand.

Mary is not the most annoying or ridiculous character in the book -- for that we have Mr. Collins and Lady Catherine de Bourgh. Nor is she ever an obstacle to the happiness of the other girls.

But to me, as a bookish and musically-inclined child myself, when I read P&P as a child, my heart went out to her because, despite her good intentions and deep study, nobody loved her and nobody even tried to understand her. Her mother has already given up on her because she is not only the least attractive of the girls, she is positively plain.

Her father, despite Mary's being the only studious one of his children, ignores her completely, something that I could not understand. I thought: If I were her father, she, not Elizabeth, would have been my favorite, if I were coarse-minded enough to have favorites among my children. Why isn't she under her well-read father's tutelage? Why isn't her musical ability encouraged and celebrated? Why hasn't she been guided into socially appropriate conversation, instead of being doomed to striking a wrong note whenever she speaks?

Which brings me, at last, to Janice Hadlow, one of dozens of writers with the audacity to attempt to write through and around Jane Austen's masterpiece? Let us pretend that the abomination Pride and Prejudice and Zombies does not exist, because it shouldn't and, to me, doesn't. There are other books which purport to be sequels or parallel retellings or even parodies, and when I read their synopses my heart always sinks. This writer thought this nonsensical story should be set against P&P, forcing readers to compare the book with the foundational novel of English literature?

Through my entire writing career, I have, like all anglophone authors, composed my works in the shadow -- yet also in the light -- of Jane Austen, and never once, despite the normal helping of authorial ego, have I imagined myself worthy to call attention to her work in the course of writing mine.

So I shake my head in pity and ignore all these Austenesque follies and grotesques. Life is too short for me to waste any of my precious reading time.

I was aware of the existence of The Other Bennet Sister, by Janice Hadlow, and I remember thinking, If you're going to stumble through an intrusion into the world of P&P, at least Mary Bennet is a worthy topic to attempt. But I had no intention ever to read it.

Until, in a podcast interview with three young women (young compared to me; they are definitely grownups), they mentioned The Other Bennet Sister in highly favorable terms. Since they had given my Speaker for the Dead a generous and well-judged reading, I could hardly fault their judgment of fiction, and when they assured me that Hadlow, contrary to all my expectations, did not embarrass herself in the writing of the novel, I resolved to give it an open-minded reading.

This is my book report on The Other Bennet Sister.

The tone of the book, the language of it, shocked me by being in exactly the right tone. Imitations of Austen are usually arch and labored; Hadlow's writing seems effortless, and her voice fits well with Austen's own style. So as I listened to the audiobook (narrated wonderfully by Carla Mendonça, 2000, Macmillan Audio), I was immediately drawn in as Hadlow's writing and Mendonça's reading of it won my acceptance and then my admiration.

The story begins before the main events of P&P, and works through some of the principal scenes of that book, all from Mary's point of view. Hadlow has mastered Austen's narrative technique so well that we experience everything with fresh eyes, because Mary really does mean well. Scorned or ignored by everyone she loves, Mary began her life as the third of a trio of sisters -- Jane, Elizabeth, and Mary. She adored them; she enjoyed them; and then, at about the age that puberty would have struck her sisters, they were assign to share a room, just the two of them, while Mary was shut out when their door closed behind them.

That heartbreak did not stop her yearning to be part of her older sisters' lives; there was never a chance of her being accepted by the narcissistic Lydia and her sidekick, Kitty. It was a lonely childhood, made unbearable by Mary's overhearing her mother tell her aunt that Mary's plainness would certainly make her unmarriageable -- which made her almost useless to her mother.

Already shut out, like most of the girls, from her father's life, to be thus dismissed by her mother left her with no champion or even friend except the watchful servant woman Hill, who tried to help Mary make the best of her appearance and of her life. Within a few chapters I loved Hill as I love all characters who are good people doing good, and Mary loved her too.

At Hill's urging, Mary attends her first ball, where the young man who fitted her with her first pair of glasses asks her to dance. Mary finds the experience exhilarating -- her first experience with actual happiness since she lost the company of her older sisters.

But Charlotte Lucas, the plain young woman of 28 who is Elizabeth's special friend in P&P, takes her aside after her second set with the optician's apprentice and warns her that to dance twice with a tradesman's boy was bad enough, but to dance a third set with him would bring down the wrath of Mrs. Bennet upon her. Mary believes her (as do we who know Mrs. Bennet well), and when the young man returns with refreshments, she essentially stiff-arms him and breaks off their companionship.

This cruel action preys upon Mary's mind until near the end of the book, for she truly liked the boy and gave him no explanation for her sudden rejection. As it was, she got plenty of abuse from her mother, who already hated the boy because she detested Mary's spectacles and had vehemently opposed her getting them -- why should it matter that glasses let Mary read, when a young woman with glasses was impossible for any eligible young man to admire? The idea that books could actually matter to a girl was unfathomable to Mrs. Bennet, especially books that were about serious subjects, not novels at all, ever.

The unhappy and happy marriages come about without taking up many pages, because this is not Pride and Prejudice, which deals with those stories in great detail. We do spend time on the marriage of their cousin, Mr. Collins, to Charlotte Lucas -- because Mary had assumed that, after Elizabeth turned him down, it would be her duty to marry him and keep the Longbourn estate in the family.

Suffice it to say that The Other Bennet Sister carries us past those marriages and into the bleak landscape of the Bennet family after Mr. Bennet dies uneventfully in his sleep. Charles and Jane take in Mrs. Bennet, Mary, and Kitty, and when Kitty soon marries, Mary is left to the unkind ministrations and selfish demands of her mother. But far worse is the presence of Caroline Bingley, Charles's sister, who is bitter because the object of her marital ambitions, Darcy, married the appalling (to her) Elizabeth.

Trapped in the same house with Caroline, Mary is the recipient of all Caroline's bile, with frequent savage remarks designed to punish Mary for being just as much a future old maid as Caroline herself. Mary escapes this hellish life by staying with Elizabeth and Darcy, but soon realizes that despire their generosity, she will never be part of that loving, closeknit family. She even tries returning to Longbourn to stay with Charlotte and Mr. Collins, where she actually finds some genuine approval of and interest in her scholarly pursuits.

Finally, though, she ends up with her Aunt Gardiner -- beloved because of her and her husband's kindness to all the Bennet girls in P&P. And what happens from then on is for you to have the pleasure of discovering for yourself, because this is the heart of the novel, and is completely true to the world and the spirit of P&P.

I'm a weeper, in my old age, so you might not think it means much that they ending of the novel had me in tears of relief and happiness for Mary and the other good people in the book. But the whole story of Mary Bennet is entertaining and moving, and by the end she has become a character worthy to live in Jane Austen's literary world.

I cannot praise Janice Hadlow enough, because not only is The Other Bennet Sister a literary tour-de-force, but also it is a novel that belongs on the shelf with P&P, Sense and Sensibility, Emma, and Persuasion, to be reread and treasured as they should be and, in my life, are.

I have been taught that Daniel Defoe was the inventor of the modern English novel, and I have read and reread Moll Flanders and Robinson Crusoe with enjoyment and admiration. Defoe's books were written before Austen's novels, which gives them temporal primacy, but it was Austen who brought us the third-person-limited viewpoint that is the most powerful tool of the narrative craft then and now.

Even J.R.R. Tolkien, author of the definitive English epic, The Lord of the Rings, in my opinion the greatest work of fiction ever written, used the techniques first brought to near perfection by Jane Austen.

For Hadlow to venture into that lofty, to-me-sacred space, and to acquit herself so well, is the most praiseworthy of accomplishments. This may not be so for some readers, but I believe that for most, as for me, reading The Other Bennet Sister will be tantamount to receiving a new Jane Austen novel, hitherto unknown, but now joining P&P as a worthy companion. Do read it, please, for the sheer pleasure of it. And, if you like audiobooks, be assured that Mendonça's performance of it is flawless, and makes what is good even better.