Review: The Other Bennet Sister by Janice Hadlow (2020)

Well, that was a slog, and no mistake. 673 pages, according to Amazon, and I felt every single one of them. And the worst of it is that nothing happens for most of them, it’s just Mary agonising about about herself, life and everything. There’s a little burst of action right at the end, but really, it was too little, too late.

Here’s the premise: the book looks at possibly the least loved of the Bennet sisters, bookish, sanctimonious prig Mary. The best of the book is found in the early chapters, where Mary’s happy childhood gradually descends into self-loathing as she realises that she is the plain one of the family, and therefore the least valued and least likely to marry well, if at all. Her father has retreated to his study, avoiding his family as much as possible, and her mother, whose sole ambition is to see all her daughters married, is relentlessly negative towards Mary. The other sisters fall into neat pairs, excluding Mary. Only Mrs Hill, the housekeeper, of all people, seems to take an interest in her.

There is one other person who seems to understand Mary’s situation, and that is Charlotte Lucas. Apart from the difference in age (almost ten years, by my calculation), this is a very natural pairing, since Charlotte is also plain and unvalued, and likely to end a spinster. She has the conversation which in P&P she had with Elizabeth, about the need to seize even the smallest opportunity of an advantageous marriage, with Mary instead. Mary takes her advice to heart, and sets out to entice Mr Collins away from his fixation with Elizabeth to herself. She feels (and the reader must surely agree) that she would have made a much better wife for him than Elizabeth, but her mother is discouraging, and in the end Mary fails even to attract his notice, while Charlotte manages to scoop him up from under everyone’s nose.

This part of the book, which intersects with the origin at many points, I found quite tedious. The repetition of key points of the original adds nothing to this book (that was Elizabeth’s story, after all, and to some extent Jane’s and Lydia’s, so the whole of it could have been dropped altogether or passed over relatively quickly. Instead, the lengthy extra passages (so much introspection!) slowed the pace down almost to a halt.

The next section was pretty dull too. Mr Bennet dies (a common strategy in JAFF), the Collinses move into Longbourn and Mary and her mother are homeless (Kitty has conveniently married a clergyman). At first they settle with the Bingleys, where Mary’s mother is quite happy, but Mary, constantly under her mother’s eye, isn’t. Then she tries the Darcys but finds herself very much the outsider in the close knit family grouping of Darcy, Elizabeth and Georgiana. So next she tries the Collinses and Longbourn, and here is where the book comes slightly off the rails.

Initially, Charlotte and Mr Collins are very much as in the book. Charlotte manages the household (and her husband!) with a sure eye, keeping him happy but out of her hair as much as possible. Mr Collins seems contented enough, but Mary thinks he’s a little sad. Because she’s still bookish and still trying to ‘improve’ herself, she sets about Mr Collins’ library and ropes him in to her reading program, to advise and guide and instruct her, just as she tried before, when she hoped to marry him herself. But this time, Mr Collins responds, and lo and behold, he turns out to be something of an intellectual, smart, thoughtful, intelligent and even self-aware. So not like Mr Collins at all, who would never have been able to see the ridiculousness of his own buffoonery. But here he actually reflects on it to Mary, and talks about his marriage. And Charlotte even becomes jealous of his growing closeness to Mary! As if!

So Mary makes a final leap to Gracechurch Street and the Gardiners, and this is where, at long last, the book actually starts to develop something resembling a plot. Mary has a makeover, which happily just smartens her up a bit without making her a raging beauty, and then there are two suitors on the scene competing for Mary’s hand, the long postponed trip to the Lakes finally takes place, and things actually happen (hallelujah!). None of it is terribly surprising, but after chapter upon chapter of gloomy introspection from Mary, this is just a breath of fresh air. I wasn’t much impressed with the final resolution of the romance, because it could have put the man in a very difficult position if he hadn’t felt the same way, but at least Mary showed some gumption.

This is a hard book for me to review because, although in many ways it’s well written, for most of it I just didn’t enjoy it. I kept going in the hope that it would finally get some momentum, and it did, right at the end, but it was really too late to save it. I didn’t notice many historical errors, although I cringed every time Mary went off walking the streets of London by herself, or entertaining one of the suitors alone. I think if the book had been reduced to a sensible length, or if its excess of pages had been filled with actual events rather than Mary’s inner thoughts and low self-esteem, I might at least have given it three stars. Frankly, the author is too good a writer to put out this turgid stuff, and she has a major publisher who should have done some serious editing on it, so no excuse. Two stars it is. But if you want the every-last-detail version of Mary’s life, or you really, really like endless introspection and analysis of books of the era, then this is definitely the book for you.