Huzzah! (as the cool kids in Regency England say) for the new Bad Wolf / britbox / BBC drama, The Other Bennet Sister. The first three episodes are binge-able now on britbox, with the remaining seven dropping weekly.
Based on Janice Hadlow’s bestselling 2020 novel of the same name, the series chronicles the personal journey of Mary Bennet – an unlikely character plucked from Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice – and placed at the centre of a charming, wholly authenic drama of self-discovery.
In a razor sharp adapted screenplay by Sarah Quintrell (His Dark Materials, The Power), we meet Mary in the thick it. Overlooked, plain, bookish, bespectacled, and generally dismissed by her shrill mother, she struggles daily to claim her identity amidst the roar of four beautiful sisters and their breathless pursuit of fashion, and suitable husbands.
As Mary, a touching, sometimes emotionally raw, and often deadpan funny performance by Ella Bruccoleri (Call the Midwife), made me proud to be a girl-dad. As we see this unconventional, intelligent young woman struggle with body image, beauty standards and the pressure to find romance, the centuries dissolve. We recognize the road she’s on, and I was here for it.
Yes, love may find this Bennet sister as she takes the London leap for a new job and new adventures, but the question is — what sort of man is worthy of our Mary? Her freedom to decide surprises even her.
She belongs to the pantheon of rough diamonds in literature, girls who have lived in the margins, and suddenly realize that their sense of self — and not the right clothes or hairstyle — is rocket fuel.
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A good friend and anglophile suggested to me that a more worthy (albeit far less wholesome) sister to Mary could be the one and only Georgina Parkin, heroine of the 1965 novel, Georgy Girl by Margaret Forster. Made into a film the following year, Forster had the rare clout to co-adapt her own screenplay. Lynn Redgrave brought the frumpy, independent Georgy to life amidst the changing values of swinging ’60s London, ultimately forging her own path to happiness.
Mary Bennet might blush, but what is 150 years between sisters?
