Jane Austen bestowed upon Mary Bennet the fate of being the unremarkable middle sister in her 1813 novel Pride and Prejudice.
Mary’s elder sister Jane was famed for her beauty, the second eldest Elizabeth was celebrated for her wit and her younger two sisters were prone to socialising or flirting with officers in the militia. Plain Mary languished in the middle.
A new novel by Janice Hadlow, The Other Bennet Sister, fleshes her out to a full character in her own right, and provides an insight into "what happened next" after her elder sisters Jane and Elizabeth got married.
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Hadlow told Kathyrn Ryan she’s stepping in the footsteps of the master (or the mistress) and she was very aware that she had huge shoes to walk in.
“I think I was emboldened to do so because I’d been thinking about Mary for some years. I started reading Pride and Prejudice probably about 20 years ago and I’ve read it probably on an annual basis ever since. It was quite a long time before I even noticed Mary."
Hadlow says Mary is a dim figure on the outskirts of the novel as it’s difficult to see anyone beyond Elizabeth’s shining light.
When she finally noticed Mary, Hadlow couldn’t stop thinking about her.
“I think it was the feeling of empathy for her that gave me the courage to actually be bold enough to go near Jane Austen’s prose myself.”
Mary’s the only woman in her household that isn’t beautiful, say Hadlow.
“The truth is, we’d all love to be Elizabeth, she’s such a wonderful sparkling heroine that most of the people who read it can’t help but want to be Lizzy, but I suppose I think quite a lot of us also know what it’s like to feel like Mary.”
It wasn’t just Mary who Hadlow wanted to bring out of the shadows.
“Once you start looking beyond the central characters you start wondering about ‘what are all these other characters up to when the central characters aren’t there, what’s going on with them?’”
The lives of Charlotte Lucas and the dreadful Mr Collins, the anti-hero of Jane Austen’s novel, also played on Hadlow’s mind.
Staying true to the romance genre of the novel and to the time in which it’s set, while staying true to Austen, was a great pleasure for Hadlow.
She says having written a book prior to this on George III and his family, she feels like she’s been living in the 18th Century for some time.
“I’ve been immersed in letters and diaries of people of that time and I’d like to think that during that experience, I’ve caught a bit of the way that they spoke to one another and I’ve tried to use that so that I’m not pastiching Austen but I might have captured something of the way that 18th Century people spoke to one another.”
People think that they were really formal and stuffy, says Hadlow, but that’s not the case, they were much more witty than that.
“I wanted to write something for Mary but Jane Austen doesn’t imagine a future for her. At the end of Pride and Prejudice, poor Mary is condemned to what seems to me quite a grim fate…”
Hadlow’s reimagined her future, trying to keep it true to what opportunities someone like her may have had in that era.
“What would make a girl like her happy and how might she have to change to learn how to enjoy that ending?”
She realised while writing that when you take a character from the edge of the stage where they’ve been put by the original author, and bring them into the spotlight, everything changes.
“Your ideas about who’s a good character and who’s a bad character, who you like and don’t like, actually shift when you start looking at the action of the novel through someone else’s eyes.”
Pride and Prejudice is really a novel about what makes a good marriage and unhappy marriages are scattered throughout its pages, says Hadlow. In The Other Bennet Sister Hadlow takes Mary to London, to where her aunty and uncle live - one of the only examples of a good marriage Jane Austen provided.
“For me, they are the agents of her transformation.”