Recognize this? “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.”
If, as I do, you love Jane Austen’s writing, the sentence may sound familiar. But it doesn’t come from Jane Austen’s pen. You should read anyway the novel from which this first sentence does come: Janice Hadlow’s The Other Bennet Sister.
With Hadlow, we re-visit Elizabeth Bennet’s family on Longbourn estate, near the Hertforshire, England fictional market village of Meryton. From Pride and Prejudice, we well remember Elizabeth’s fine mind and quick humor, a young woman who has "a lively, playful disposition, which delighted in anything ridiculous,” even as she is the moral compass around which all the action in the novel revolves. When Elizabeth meets the arrogant Fitzwilliam Darcy, a cantankerous relationship begins which ends, many pages later, in the happiest of marriages.
Elizabeth has sisters, each of whom has some significance in Pride and Prejudice. She who has the least significance is plain, oafish, and bookish middle sister Mary Bennet. She takes her walks by herself. She always has her nose in the pages of a book. She speaks out of turn. And, of course, she is no beauty. But in The Other Bennet Sister, Mary becomes the center of everything. Still the least fine-looking of the five Bennett sisters at the beginning of the novel, who carries a volume around everywhere so that she will not have to converse and socialize, she begins to rebel against her sisters and her lack of self-respect when her father Mr. Bennet dies.
Although a distant man, Mr. Bennet is the owner of the library that Mary so loves. She is also the unfortunate daughter of Mrs. Bennet, whom I believe, in Jane Austen’s presentation of her, is one of the great, marvelous fools in all literature. But once Mr. Bennet passes away, Mary is flung upon her own devices and, gradually, she begins, as it were, to come out. She has passion. She knows how to express herself and does. She discovers the many values she possesses that she and her sisters have overlooked. As Hadlow writes, “There was no one to judge her… she might change if she wished to.”
This is a long novel, and Hadlow knows throughout how important a character like Mary Bennet can be. So, Hadlow does not hurry. She allows us to enter Mary’s mind and heart to see what’s there in full detail, expressed in a kind of imitation of Jane Austen’s style that yet is very much its own form of fine writing. Throughout, we see Mary’s awakening, how the books she reads do allow her to think for herself, and how she comes to understand that her own bookishness has allowed her significant personal authority to emerge. She becomes a complete character in her own right, whose fate the reader follows with ever heightening concern and, finally, admiration. Mary Bennet is by no means perfect, but as far as I’m concerned, you eventually cannot take your eyes off her.
And to be sure, we wonder if Mary Bennett, having finally found herself, will find the kind of love that her sisters Elizabeth and the others have.
Mary does.
Jane Austen is one of a kind. But Janice Hadlow has taken a significant riff from Austen’s fine work and written a remarkable novel of her own.
© 2024 Terence Clarke. All rights reserved.
Note: No Plagiarism Software, also known as Artificial Intelligence, was used in the composition of this piece.
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