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It has long been a truth universally acknowledged that a scholarly, studious, or socially awkward young woman must be transformed before she can woo suitors into asking her to prom. From Olivia Newton-John’s Sandy in “Grease” to the late-’90s teen classic “She’s All That,” the glasses must be tossed aside in lieu of contacts. The hair must come down. The sensible shoes must be replaced with six-inch, red-bottomed stilettos. Only then may she be presented to the world as beautiful, desirable, and worthy of male attention.
This familiar glow-up trope is cleverly resisted in the BBC’s adaptation (available for streaming on Amazon Prime) of Janice Hadlow’s “The Other Bennet Sister,” an imagined parallel life for Jane Austen’s most overlooked Bennet daughter, Mary. The series is not an imitation of Austen, nor does it presume to tell us what Austen really intended for her most solemn and least celebrated sister. Rather, it imagines how Mary might have found her own way through the unforgiving constraints of Regency society after a lifetime of being treated as the family disappointment. As a lover of Austen’s novels, I suspect she herself would have enjoyed it; I don’t think there can be a higher compliment.
In Austen’s original novel, Mary Bennet is remembered as little more than the pious and pedantic middle sister who meanders feebly at the piano and lacks the beauty or wit of her sisters. The BBC’s adaptation begins with that familiar figure but asks what sort of inner life might exist beneath the awkwardness.
Portrayed charmingly by Ella Bruccoleri, Mary is curious, earnest, bookish, and she is content to spend her leisure consuming tomes of nonfiction: geology, history, and whatever other volumes might shield her from a world in which she has never quite belonged. Eventually, she moves to London to live with her aunt, Mrs. Gardiner, played by Indira Varma, with precisely the sort of benevolent wisdom Austen gives her in the novel. There, Mary works as a governess and begins, at last, to grow beyond the cramped emotional confines of her trying mother’s nest.
Even Penelope Featherington, in her season of “Bridgerton,” had her hair redone in flattering curls and traded her pastel dresses for a more alluring and seductive silhouette before Colin Bridgerton finally gave her the time of day. “The Other Bennet Sister” takes a gentler and more interesting route.
A pivotal moment comes when Mrs. Gardiner takes Mary to the haberdashery and encourages her to design her own dress. Mary, having slowly mustered some confidence, channels all her wallflower eccentricity into a design she dreams up herself, blissfully indifferent to the fashions contouring society gatherings. The point is not that she will turn every head at the next masquerade ball. It is that the dress is distinctly hers, and she is not shy about it. Mrs. Gardiner does not drag Mary from her mother’s influence merely to place her in the orbit of a future husband. She gives her the freedom to develop taste, preference, and judgment of her own.
It is here that the series triumphs. Romance still matters — this is still the Jane Austen Cinematic Universe — but it is not pursued as a means to an end. Before Mary can be loved properly, she must first accept that happiness is not a privilege reserved for conventionally comelier girls. “Our happiness is in our own hands,” Mr. Collins, strongly cast here as Ryan Sampson, tells her in a poignant scene, and Mary takes the lesson to heart.
Only once she begins to believe this do suitors of substance begin to recognize her. Midway through the series, she encounters William Ryder, played by Laurie Davidson, a kind of Regency bohemian who introduces her to the idea of indulging her impulses. He is charming, unconventional, and exactly the sort of figure who might tempt a woman like Mary into mistaking libertinism for liberation. But it is ardent romantic Tom Hayward, played with endearing conviction by Dónal Finn, who truly appreciates Mary as she is.
That balance is what makes the adaptation work. Mary is not transformed into a spectacled facsimile of Elizabeth Bennet. Nor is she grafted onto some feminist iconoclast, misunderstood only because the world was too cruel to appreciate her brilliance. She remains awkward, self-serious, and frequently absurd.
In that sense, “The Other Bennet Sister” succeeds because it does not flatter its heroine by pretending she was perfect all along. It insists that imperfection is not the same thing as unworthiness. Mary Bennet does not need a makeover. She needs room to make her own choices, occasionally err, and be loved without becoming someone else.
It is not the conventional conceit of Jane Austen’s novels, but if the author of “Persuasion” and “Pride and Prejudice” were around today, I believe she would approve. The series speaks to contemporary anxieties about self-worth and reinvention while remaining close enough to Austen’s moral universe to feel like a contemporary continuation. In a culture fixated on superficial perfection — from gratuitous Botox injections to whatever deranged absurdities “LooksMaxing” entails — “The Other Bennet Sister” offers the more compelling proposition that perhaps Mary Bennet was never the “other” sister; she was only waiting for someone to look at her long enough to notice.
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Harry Khachatrian (@Harry1T6) is a film critic for the Washington Examiner. He is a software engineer, holds a master’s degree from the University of Toronto, and writes about wine at BetweenBottles.com.
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