The Other Bennet Sister by Janice Hadlow

This falls into the genre of fan fiction--It is not the retelling of Pride and Prejudice but rather an extention of that story. The novel explores the predicament of Mary, the overlooked middle daughter of the Bennet household. Mary doesn’t have a story of her own in Austen’s novel – she’s there to serve as a foil to her sisters’ charm, and a temporary obstacle to their happiness. Bookish and gauche, Mary is the one who can be relied on to give an ill-judged performance on the pianoforte or deliver a sententious comment at exactly the wrong moment. By the end of the novel her circumstances have changed, but she has not; she’s still just as plain and awkward as she ever was, but with her sisters variously settled elsewhere, she is at least not compared to them daily but she is not a woman of note either. In this version of the story Mary begins very much as Austen depicted her – plain, awkward, overlooked – but she is now our protagonist, the one we are supposed to be rooting for. As the great majority of us are not beautiful to look at or glittering company, we are predisposed to hope that her studiousness and loyalty will somehow eventually pay off. We come to understand what has made her the way she is. From girlhood, she has been mortified by her mother, who constantly evaluates her five daughters’ looks, and finds only Mary’s wanting. Her father, too, is a source of grief; she is desperate to be close to him, but he makes a pet of Lizzie, and only seems to speak to Mary – Hadlow is quoting Austen here – in put-downs. Her sisters exist in fixed pair-bonds: Jane-and-Lizzie, Kitty-and-Lydia; Mary is left to drift alone. Teased, belittled and criticised, it is no wonder she is so ill at ease; no wonder she blunders. I cringed a few times at Mary's missteps but mostly was rooting for her, and very much enjoyed once again being plunged into the world of Austen.