To be a clever, bookish teenage girl is to spend a certain amount of time standing on the sidelines, feeling invisible to boys. When I was at school, there seemed to be a natural division: you could be smart or pretty, but you could not be both. Of course, there were girls who were indeed both, but they either intentionally dumbed themselves down or spent an inordinate amount of time trying to make themselves beautiful. (Perhaps other schools and other early-2000s teenagehoods were different, but that was the reality of mine.)
The Other Bennet Sister – a new BBC costume adaptation of Janice Hadlow’s 2020 novel telling the story of Mary, the intelligent, bespectacled, painfully shy sister to Pride and Prejudice heroine Lizzy – sent me right back to that awkward age. That’s how vividly it conjures the extreme lack of confidence that can come from being sidelined, whether by one’s peers or, as in Mary’s case, one’s own mother. Watching Ella Bruccoleri’s excellent performance reunited me with those awful feelings of shyness and exclusion, of walking with your head down in the hope that no one notices you. “Why do you walk like that?” I remember a popular, vivacious girl in my year asking me, not unkindly. She couldn’t comprehend what it meant to walk with such a lack of confidence. I wished I could borrow even a pinch of hers.
Other bookish women I know, who were once bookish girls, have said the same about the experience of watching The Other Bennet Sister. It all goes to show how rare it still feels to have a TV drama, especially a costume drama, whose heroine is an ordinary-looking young woman, as opposed to one who looks like a supermodel. Equally refreshing is that her character arc isn’t purely a romantic one. There is romance, of course, but the show’s narrative focus is less an Austenian marriage plot and more about Mary coming to terms with who she is, finding independence and learning to love herself. If I had a teenage daughter, I’d be trying to get her to watch it with me, possibly in vain.
These messages are important to teenage girls, but they can also feel powerfully resonant to adult women. I know many women who were and continue to be body shamed by their own mothers, as Mary is by Mrs Bennet. In Pride and Prejudice adaptations, Mrs Bennet is usually played as silly and shrill but not malicious. Here the writers, and Ruth Jones (who plays her), are masterful in showing how no two siblings have the same experience of their parents. To Lizzy, pretty and charming, the heroine of her own life, their mother may indeed seem silly; to Mary, the victim in hers, she is a bully.
As readers of Pride and Prejudice will know, Mary and her sisters cannot inherit, and on their father’s death will be made homeless – and so they are reliant on making a good match for survival. That Mary feels this pressure, while also knowing that everyone else is aware of it, makes her social interactions all the more agonising. I know many women, too, who feel acutely aware of their economic circumstances and how they differ from those of their peers. And I know many women who are only on the property ladder because they married “well” to a man with an inheritance – of the three-bed semi variety as opposed to a great estate in Derbyshire, but still.
Commentators complain about endless film and TV rehashes and spin-offs of the same stories, usually those written by Austen and the Brontës, and I agree with them. It is boring – and unlike this show, they are rarely very good. What interests me, though, is why 19th-century marriage plots continue to be revisited and reinvented, and I think it’s something to do with us not being as far removed from the past and its mores as we like to believe. Modern women are not usually faced with a choice between “marriage or misery”, as Charlotte Lucas so brutally puts it to Mary in The Other Bennet Sister. And yet these questions – of the institution of marriage, of economics – have not entirely gone away.
In asking women, especially young women, to ponder the question of who we are outside those structures, The Other Bennet Sister is quietly radical. This newspaper just ran a lifestyle feature on how “clever is the new cool”. For celebrities and influencers, and certain literary types, I suppose it’s true. I do wonder if this has trickled down to comprehensive schools, though. From my conversations with teenage girls, some of whom still feel a need to hide their intelligence to avoid teasing or even bullying, I suspect not. I think back to those years and remember how painfully self-conscious I was: both about how I looked (big eyes, freckles, flat chest) and how clever I was. Even typing the word “clever” in relation to myself felt hard just now, more than 25 years later. Admitting to it wasn’t something you did.
Of course, we all grow up and, if we are lucky, blossom, have therapy, gain self-understanding, find our people. Maybe we even find someone to love us for who we are, as Mary no doubt will. There’s a part of you, though, that wants her to eschew all men and become a novelist, like her original creator did. A couple of cats, a room of her own: as far as costume dramas go, that’s a happy ending we’re yet to see.