The Other Bennet Sister Gets Mary Bennet Right

Added: 2026-05-27

[00:00:00]Last week, I made a video reacting to the first few episodes of The Other Bennett Sister, which is currently airing in the US on Brit Box. In that video, I mentioned how my one small issue with the show is the disconnect I feel between Mary as portrayed in the show and Mary as described by Jane Austin in the pages of Pride and Prejudice. The more I thought about this, the more this disconnect has gone from being a bug to being a feature.

[00:00:22]Let's talk about it.

[00:00:24]Welcome to Think Thing, a YouTube channel where we are continuing to take a close look at Pride and Prejudice and all of its various iterations in film and TV in celebration of Jane Austin's 250th birthday. If you like thinking and talking about literary adaptations and media analysis, then you are in the right place. Please subscribe if you want to see more of this kind of thing.

[00:00:45]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 that she is beautiful. Or so my mother taught us.

[00:00:58]>> So yeah, the Mary Bennett that we see depicted in The Other Bennett Sister, the BBC series based on the novel by Janice Hadllo, at first blush seems to be nothing like the Mary Bennett we know from Pride and Prejudice. Mary in the other Bennett sister is a clever and sardonic introvert who is quiet and dryly funny and has a low self-esteem from being raised to think of herself as the plain one compared to her four comparatively remarkable sisters. Each known for some winsome quality or other.

[00:01:27]The Mary described in the pages of Pride and Prejudice, however, is a very different sort of character. Let's take a look at exactly how Jane Austin described Mary and then see if we can't square her character with the young woman who is the main character of the other Bennett sister.

[00:01:43]>> Pride observed Mary who peaked herself upon the solidity of her reflections is a very common failing. I believe by all that I have ever read, I am convinced that it is very common indeed, that human nature is particularly prone to it, and that there are very few of us who do not cherish a feeling of self-complacency on the score of some quality or other, real or imaginary.

[00:02:04]Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.

[00:02:16]>> Ms. Austin gives us this ironic gem of an observation from Mary early in Pride and Prejudice in chapter 5. She peaked herself on the solidity of her own reflections. In other words, she was both prideful and vain as she moralized about these failings in others.

[00:02:32]Throughout Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austin describes Mary as shallow, performatively intellectual whilst being incurious and dull-witted, a self-righteous moralizer, and an illtalented showoff. In chapter six of Pride and Prejudice, Austin tells us that Mary is the only plain one in the family, that she was always impatient for display and had neither genius nor taste. Austin also describes her as pedantic and conceited. In chapter 12, Ms. Austin writes, >> "They found Mary, as usual, deep in the study of thorough base and human nature, and had some new extracts to admire and some new observations of threadbear morality to listen to." I had to look up that thorough bass comment and was fascinated to learn that during the Baroque period of musical composition, it was common practice for composers to only imply the harmony parts of their compositions, allowing for different interpretations and even improvisations in the harmonic structure of a given piece of music. Thoroughbase or boso continuo was the name given to this practice in which a baseline was written out and a series of numbers was used to hint at the harmonic structures while leaving all this room for interpretation. Many of the best composers of the time including Bach, Handel and Telmon composed this way and wrote treatises about the practice. So when Austin writes that Mary was deep in the study of thoroughbass and human nature, it's winking at a certain performative intellectualism, it would be like suggesting someone was trying to understand human nature by reading a book about string theory. In chapter 18, during the infamous musical performance at the Netherfield Ball, Austin says of Mary's eagerness to perform, >> Mary's powers were by no means fitted for such a display. Her voice was weak and her manner affected. Perhaps the most striking description of Mary's conceited nature comes in chapter 22 after Lizzie has rejected Mr. Collins.

[00:04:25]There's a brief moment when the idea of Mr. Collins perhaps turning his attention to a different Bennett sister was considered and Austin writes, >> "Mary might have been prevailed on to accept him. She rated his abilities much higher than any of the others. There was a solidity in his reflections which often struck her, and though by no means so clever as herself, she thought that if encouraged to read and improve himself by such an example as hers, he might become a very agreeable companion.

[00:04:51]>> We'll come back to this because it gives us a rare glimpse at Mary's personal perspective. Pride and Prejudice concludes with the happy marriages of the two eldest Bennett sisters and the scandal laden marriage of the youngest.

[00:05:03]Austin describes Kitty as maturing in the absence of Lydia's silly influence and spending more time at Pimberly, leaving Mary as the last child remaining at Longorn. Austin writes, >> "Mary was the only daughter who remained at home, and she was necessarily drawn from the pursuit of accomplishments by Mrs. Bennett's being quite unable to sit alone. Mary was obliged to mix more with the world, but she could still moralize over every morning visit, and as she was no longer mortified by comparisons between her sister's beauty and her own, it was suspected by her father that she submitted to the change without much reluctance.

[00:05:36]>> And that's a decent enough overview of everything Pride and Prejudice had to say on the subject of Miss Mary Bennett.

[00:05:41]If you've seen The Other Bennett Sister, or at least the first five episodes that I've seen, then you may find this description to be at odds with the main character of the show, which depicts a humble, put upon, and darkly sardonic young woman who is much more likely to run herself down than to display anything like conceited pride or vanity.

[00:06:00]This was my chief, if minor, complaint in the first video I made about the show. I acknowledged that making a whole sequel featuring a conceited know-it-all as its main character was a terrible idea. And so obviously some redemption was required in order to make it all work. But I feared the show didn't go far enough toward closing the distance between Jane Austin's Mary and this Mary. And yet I may have been too hasty in this critique. I have not read Janice Hadllo's novel, but the show does in fact show us some very subtle hints that this Mary is pedantic, that she lacks taste, that she is at least partly an intellectual pretender and performative know-it-all. These beats are so subtle I missed them on my first watch through. I pointed out the show's slight nod toward Mary's pedantry in the last video I did where she corrects poor Mr. Sparrow's grammar at the assembly ball.

[00:06:48]>> I should have had less voice.

[00:06:53]>> It's >> Some folks online have complained about this scene because Mary later employs improper grammar herself using mother and I incorrectly and so they complained this was inconsistent. But it's actually entirely consistent with a character who likes to seem educated and areriodite whilst being neither. It's also worth noting how when Mr. Hayward asks Mary what she likes to read for fun, she lists works of non-fiction, histories, and geologies.

[00:07:21]>> What do you like to read?

[00:07:23]>> Uh, works of non-fiction. Um, histories and uh and geology.

[00:07:29]>> But in fact, this is Mary pretending to be a great intellect. In the first episode, we actually get a glimpse of her reading a toddry pamphlet in the kitchen called The Terrible Fate of Annie Elm. Later, when pressed by Mr. Ryder, she confesses to having enjoyed reading the servants pamphlets when she was a child because they detailed the most grizzly crimes. But again, we saw her reading one such pamphlet in episode 1, so we know that her enjoyment of lowbrow fiction was not limited to her childhood. Mary tells Mr. Hayward that she doesn't like poetry. It's just words," she says. And this is another nod at Mary from the book. She's maybe a little dense. It's not that she dislikes poetry so much as that it's entirely over her head. She just doesn't get it.

[00:08:13]Mr. Hayward takes it upon himself to teach Mary the joys of poetry. Another example of Mary's lack of taste is in the fabrics that she chooses for her dresses. They are garish and bright, and when she wears the dresses at formal occasions, she sticks out like a sore thumb compared to the elegant dresses worn by the other ladies. Everyone is very kind to her despite these comparatively bold style choices. Well, almost everyone. But I do think this is an attempt to square this Mary with Austin's Mary. The difference between these versions of the character is not in the details. It's in the context in which the details are shown. The other Bennett sister tells its story from Mary's own perspective. We are each the main characters of our own stories. And so Mary is kinder to herself than Jane Austin was. Austin used Mary as a foil for Lizz's journey and as comic relief.

[00:09:02]But in real life, overbearing pedants are that way for reasons often related to low self-esteem. So if we see Mary as a real three-dimensional person, we cannot help but see her sympathetically.

[00:09:15]In researching for this essay, I found an excellent blog post by Arie Pearlstein in which he suggests that the descriptions of Mary and Pride and Prejudice are perhaps the result of an unreliable narrator. He writes, "The narrative is subjective, written from Elizabeth's prejudiced point of view and is completely unreliable as a description of Mary. Rather, it provides the reader with a perspective on Lizzie herself. I.e. that Lizzy, who prides herself on being the best studier of character among the Bennett sisters, has dismissed Mary as a pedant because Lizzie feels threatened by Mary's vastly superior knowledge and insight. And I would also toss in some musical jealousy as well. It is a pretty safe bet that if, as Lizzy herself acknowledges to Darcy at Rosings, Lizzy does not practice piano enough to play really well, you can be darn sure that Lizzy does not study thorough bass, as Mary does. If we consider Pride and Prejudice to be largely a story told from Lizz's point of view, many things become possible in terms of reinterpretations of events and other characters from the story. In this light, Mrs. Bennett being an overbearing and unrelenting bully that she's portrayed as in the other Bennett sister also makes sense as this is a story from Mary's point of view.

[00:10:29]Similarly, Charlotte's overt scheming to secure Mr. Collins's proposal is fair game, even if it differs from how Lizzie viewed Charlotte in Pride and Prejudice.

[00:10:38]Indeed, every sentence that describes Mary in Jane Austin's book can reasonably be seen as being some version of Lizz's perspective, except for one.

[00:10:48]remember this.

[00:10:49]>> Mary might have been prevailed on to accept him. She rated his abilities much higher than any of the others. There was a solidity in his reflections which often struck her, and though by no means so clever as herself, she thought that if encouraged to read and improve himself by such an example as hers, he might become a very agreeable companion.

[00:11:08]>> This one section of text really does appear to be coming from Mary's personal point of view and not filtered through Lizz's perspective. And by itself, it's actually not terrible. I can see Mary from the other Bennett sister having something like this perspective on Mr. Collins. So yeah, I hereby take back my prior criticism of the other Bennett sister and my perceived disconnect between the version of Mary depicted in the show and the Mary we know from the pages of Pride and Prejudice. Yes, there are differences, but the differences make some sense when you consider the context and note all of the ways the show is nodding at some of those personality traits that Austin was mocking. actually do have a couple of very minor criticisms of the show, but I'm going to save those for a future video. How about you? How are you enjoying the show? Let me know in the comments, and I'll see you next time.