Mary Bennet is Charming: it's the Other Bennet Sisters that are the problem, writes Griselda Heppel.
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| The servants' view: Longbourn by Jo Baker |
Yet another rewriting of Pride and Prejudice. We’ve had it from the servants’ point of view (Jo Baker’s Longbourn), it’s infused Bridget Jones’s Diary, and been recast as a comic horror film, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, starring the Undead. (This last version may be a kind of backhanded compliment to Jane Austen on the deathless status of her most loved work, I couldn’t possibly say.)
And now, heaven help us, we have Mary Bennet’s story.
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| Suffused with Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice: Bridget Jones's Diary by Helen Fielding |
That’s right. The hilariously tedious, pedantic, verbose, two-dimensional middle sister whose only function is for us to laugh at her. Whether or not you find her a believable character, or feel there’s a touch of cruelty in her creation, there's no escaping the fact that this is how Jane Austen wrote her.
But guess what. Mary had hidden depths her creator was too shallow to comprehend. Luckily Janice Hadlow has come to the rescue with her novel, The Other Bennet Sister, now adapted into a 10 part TV series... which, not being a fan of stories that feed directly off other stories, using characters and situations for which the hard work of creation has already been shouldered by another writer, I had no intention of watching.
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| The Other Bennet Sister by Janice Hadlow |
But of course I did.
The first three episodes anyway, as friends assured me I had to get beyond the plot of the original book (which takes up the first two) for Mary’s story to start.
And now you’ll expect me either to be bowled over, in spite of myself, or confirmed in my original prejudice (hee hee) against the whole idea.
The answer is: neither. It just feels…. Weird.
I can’t fault Ella Bruccoleri, who is charming as Mary Bennet. Ignored or laughed at by her sisters and father, bullied by her ridiculous mother, she tugs at your heartstrings with her sad, puzzled expression and timid smile.
But to make her stand out in her awkwardness, all the other young women are reduced to clones of each other. It took me these first three episodes to distinguish between Jane, Lizzy, Kitty and Lydia Bennet and Charlotte Lucas. It’s not that they all look alike; they all seem to be directed to act with exactly the same mannerisms, the same tense, knowing smiles, their hair scraped back from their faces in the same style. In Episode 3, a new character is introduced, Ann Baxter, clearly intended to be a friend for Mary, and she is no different from all the other young women. Ella Bruccoleri might just as well be moving through the scenes of a Regency toy theatre, the only creature of flesh and blood among dozens of brightly painted smiling paper dolls on sticks.
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| Paper dolls on sticks: a Regency Toy Theatre. By Kim Traynor - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26407342 |
This is one way to deal with the sheer weight of Jane Austen’s legacy, I suppose. Better for the author/script writer to sketch the well-known characters in as lightly as possible than dare to adopt them as if they were theirs. And there is something engaging in the vision of a mousy, put-upon young woman blossoming as she finds herself entering her own story, complete with changes in circumstances and handsome young men to fall in love with.
But that’s just it. It’s her own story. Not Jane Austen’s. Janice Hadlow has created a sweet, believable, sympathetic heroine here. If only she’d dreamt up a few authentic characters to surround her, and constructed an exciting, original plot of her own, this would be a completely different – and more satisfying – watch.
Find out more about Griselda Heppel here:
and her children's books:
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