The Other Bennet Sister

The Other Bennet Sister (BBC, 2026). Left to right: Maddie Close (Jane Bennet Bingley), Poppy Gilbert (Elizabeth Bennet Darcy), Elizabeth Bruccoleri (Mary Bennet), Molly Wright (Kitty Bennet Buncock), and Grace Hogg-Robinson (Lydia Bennet Wickham). Photo credit: James Pardon. Image source: BritBox

I have ambivalent feelings about spoilers in commentary about novels, movies, and opera. I try to avoid them (not entirely successfully) in my writing for E&I, or where they are unavoidable given what I want to discuss, usually set them apart with "Spoiler alert!/End of spoiler" tags.

Of course, there are works of narrative art that are spoiler-proof. Would it ruin Joyce's Ulysses to know before undertaking to read it that Molly Bloom has the final word, and what that word is? Would it ruin an Astaire–Rogers musical to know whether, after their initial antagonism, Fred and Ginger wind up as a romantic couple? Would it ruin Tosca to know how many of the four main characters survive the opera? [1]

Perhaps this is why I've lost count of the number of times I've watched my favorite movies or experienced my favorite operas (although La Bohème would be my Puccini choice rather than Tosca). And it's perhaps why I read and reread the novels of Jane Austen: knowing the outcomes does not diminish the pleasures they offer.

But despite the numerous spoiler-proof examples among my own favorites, I try to avoid learning too much about a narrative work before I encounter it for the first time. Partly this is to preserve the enjoyment of the unfolding story without knowing what will happen. And partly it's to keep my thoughts about what I'm experiencing as free of preconceptions as possible. So when I heard that the BBC streaming service BritBox would be carrying a series based on Janice Hadlow's 2020 novel The Other Bennet Sister, which I hadn't read, I deliberately avoided reviews, promotional interviews, and trailers, and urged watching friends not to tell me about it.

Cover of the U.S. edition of The Other Bennet Sister by Janice Hadlow, Holt Paperbacks, 2021. Image source: Bookshop.org

As a result of avoiding others' thoughts on the series I independently came up with my own (mis)conceptions: I thought that the entire 5-hour, 10-episode series was a retelling of Pride and Prejudice from the point of view of Mary Bennet. Mary, of course, is the middle Bennet daughter, and is plain, bookish, and moralizing where her older and younger sisters are beautiful and kind (Jane), lively and witty (Elizabeth), and gossipy and flirtatious (Kitty and Lydia). Also, while Jane and Elizabeth have a close bond, and Kitty "follow[s] wherever Lydia leads," Mary is something of the odd girl out among the sisters, and does not have a close companion among them.

Austen is unsparing in her description of Mary:

Mary had neither genius nor taste; and though vanity had given her application, it had given her likewise a pedantic air and conceited manner, which would have injured a higher degree of excellence than she had reached. [2]

Seeing the action of Pride and Prejudice from the perspective of the introverted, socially awkward and often-overlooked Mary would have been brilliant enough, and indeed this is how the series begins. We watch the arrival of the Bingley party at the Meryton assembly, Mr. Collins' inept courting of every Bennet sister but Mary, her humiliation at the Netherfield Ball, and, finally, the carriages rolling off with her sisters and their new husbands, leaving her behind.

Title page of Pride and Prejudice: A Novel in Three Volumes. By the author of "Sense and Sensibility." T. Edgerton, 1813. Image source: Internet Archive

We also see a few scenes outside the two inches of ivory of Pride and Prejudice: the growing friendship between Mary and her optician, Mr. Sparrow (a character not in Austen's novel, played by Aaron Gill), quickly squashed by the overbearing Mrs. Bennet; and, of course, the news of Kitty's marriage to a Mr. Buncock (also Hadlow's invention). But by the end of the second 30-minute episode we have reached the end of the action of Austen's novel, which turns out to be the prelude to Mary's continuing story.

That story mixes elements from multiple Austen novels and their adaptations, primarily—spoiler alert!—Sense and Sensibility. Like Mrs. Dashwood and her daughters on the death of Mr. Dashwood, Mrs. Bennet (Ruth Jones) and Mary (Ella Bruccoleri) are forced to leave their home after the death of Mr. Bennet (an especially ascerbic Richard E. Grant) and the inheritance of the estate by a near relation, Mr. Collins (Ryan Sampson).

While staying in London with her Aunt and Uncle Gardiner (Indira Varma and Richard Coyle), Mary is introduced to Tom Hayward (Dónal Finn). Like Sense and Sensibility's Edward Ferrars, he is shy and unassuming, but Hayward's love of Wordsworth's poetry suggests hidden depths of feeling. Unfortunately, he also resembles Edward Ferrars in turning out to have an existing understanding of mutual commitment with another young woman.

Mary then meets a more available man, William Ryder (Laurie Davidson). Like Sense and Sensibility's Willoughby, he is charming, handsome and impulsive. Also like Willoughby, his attachment is genuine but his intentions are dubious.

—End of spoilers.—

The 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice series seems to have been a particular touchstone for the principal screenwriter Sarah Quintrell and casting director Kathleen Crawford. The actress portraying Mary, Ella Bruccoleri, bears a certain resemblance to Lucy Briers, who played Mary in that series:

Left: Ella Bruccoleri as Mary in the 2026 BBC adaptation of The Other Bennet Sister.
Right: Lucy Briers as Mary in the 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice.
Image sources: Left: Bristol Live; Right: Jane Austen Literary Foundation

In a knowing wink to fans, Briers herself appears in another role in The Other Bennet Sister: she plays the kindhearted family maidservant Mrs. Hill, who becomes a sort of surrogate mother to the lonely Mary.

Lucy Briers as Mrs. Hill in The Other Bennet Sister. Image source: TV Guide

Tanya Reynolds as Caroline Bingley has a supercilious and disapproving look that is not dissimilar to that of the brilliantly awful Anna Chancellor in the same role in 1995:

Left: Tanya Roberts as Caroline Bingley in the 2026 BBC adaptation of The Other Bennet Sister.
Right: Anna Chancellor as Caroline Bingley in the 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice.
Image sources: Left: Bristol Post; Right: Frock Flicks

And Charlotte Lucas's calmly appraising gaze when she's in the company of Mr. Collins is a feature both of the performance of Anna Fenton-Garvey in The Other Bennet Sister and that of Lucy Scott, who played Charlotte in 1995:

Left: Anna Fenton-Garvey as Charlotte Lucas in the 2026 BBC adaptation of The Other Bennet Sister.
Right: Lucy Scott as Charlotte Lucas in the 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice.
Image sources: Left: Oxford School of Drama; Right: TV Tropes

In The Other Bennet Sister, Mary gets to visit the Lake District with the Gardiners, the trip for which Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice must substitute "a more contracted tour" to Derbyshire. During the tour of the Lakes there are incidents that recall Catherine Morland's rain-drenched expedition to Blaize Castle in Northanger Abbey and Marianne Dashwood's accident in Sense and Sensibility. And Quintrell carefully weaves in throughout the series moments that echo Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion.

But The Other Bennet Sister is more than a pastiche of characters and scenes from Austen. In the series Mary is (largely) freed from the burdens of living with her belittling father and domineering, emotionally manipulative mother. While traveling and residing with her sympathetic aunt and uncle, and no longer subject to her parents' constant unfavorable comparisons of her to her prettier and more outgoing sisters, Mary slowly gains in self-confidence and self-knowledge. She grows beyond the character as imagined by Austen and as seen through the eyes of others in Pride and Prejudice. As Janice Hadlow writes in her novel, "There was no-one to judge her. Here, she thought, she might alter everything about herself if she wished to." [3]

The series is also unlike Austen and other Austen adaptations in the marked presence of people of South Asian heritage among the commercial and professional classes in London, among them Mr. Sparrow, Mrs. Gardiner, and the woman with whom Thomas Hayward has an understanding, Ann Baxter (a character not in Hadlow's novel, played by Varada Sethu). While such a prevalence would probably have been more characteristic of London at the end of the 19th century, decades after the Regency period in which The Other Bennet Sister takes place, it's a welcome reminder that Britain was then and remains now a multicultural society.

Richard Coyle (Mr. Gardiner) and Indira Varma (Mrs. Gardiner) in The Other Bennet Sister. Image source: Yours

Before seeing The Other Bennet Sister, I also thought that I knew how Mary's story would end. In A Memoir of Jane Austen, Jane's nephew James Austen-Leigh (her eldest brother James' son, who attended her funeral in Winchester as a 20-year-old) wrote of his aunt,

She certainly took a kind of parental interest in the beings whom she had created, and did not dismiss them from her thoughts when she had finished her last chapter. . .She would, if asked, tell us many little particulars about the subsequent career of some of her people. In this traditionary way we learned. . .that Kitty Bennet was satisfactorily married to a clergyman near Pemberley, while Mary obtained nothing higher than one of her uncle Philip's clerks, and was content to be considered a star in the society of Meriton. . . [4]

Title page of A Memoir of Jane Austen by her nephew J. E. Austen-Leigh, Third Edition, 1872. Image source: Internet Archive

I hope it's not a spoiler to inform you that this is not Mary's fate in The Other Bennet Sister. As novelist Jo Baker writes in her review of the novel, living with the Gardiners allows Mary to "let down her defences. . .[and] become comfortably herself." And with that new comfort in her own skin comes the possibility of true happiness. [5]

Many thanks to the dear friends who enabled us to see the series (and no, BritBox, no passwords were shared). We found it delightful, and were happy to learn that we can expect a three-part (90-minute?) Christmas special in December.

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1. Spoiler alerts!
   
   • Ulysses: The famous final words of Molly Bloom's novel-ending monologue are ". . .yes I said yes I will Yes."
   • Fred and Ginger: Their producer Pandro S. Berman once said, "The minute the names of Astaire and Rogers go up on the marquee, the audience knows they belong together." In fact, in only two of their musicals do they not end the movie as a romantic couple, and in those two films their characters are husband and wife: The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (1939) and The Barkleys of Broadway (1948). They don't end these two films together due to an untimely death in the former, and an amicable divorce in the latter.
   • Tosca: Of the four major characters—the artist Mario Cavaradossi; his lover, the opera diva Floria Tosca; Cavaradossi's friend, the escaped political prisoner Cesare Angelotti; and the head of the police, Baron Scarpia—none survive the end of the opera: two die by suicide, one by murder, and one by firing squad. SF Opera apparently does not think that widespread advance knowledge of the fates of the characters is any detriment to the box office: including 2026–27, Tosca has been scheduled in eight of the past 26 seasons, or about once every three years.
   —End of spoilers.
2. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, Thomas Edgerton, 1813. Ch. VI, p. 52. https://archive.org/details/prideprejudiceno00aust_1/page/n61/mode/1up
3. Janice Hadlow, The Other Bennet Sister, Holt, 2020, Ch. 52.
4. J. E. Austen-Leigh, A Memoir of Jane Austen, Third Edition, Richard Bentley and Son, 1872, pp. 148–149; https://archive.org/details/memoirofjaneaus00aust/page/148/mode/2up. Exactly how Mary and her husband wind up living in Meryton, rather than in London where he is employed, is not explained.
5. Jo Baker, "The Other Bennet Sister by Janice Hadlow review – what happened to Mary after Pride and Prejudice." The Guardian, 11 January 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/11/the-other-bennet-sister-janice-hadlow-review