We all know who Elizabeth Bennet is. In Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, she is the blueprint for the cool and confident heroine: sharp, charming, and very sure of herself. She is the kind of girl who can walk into a room and somehow owns it without even raising her voice.
What if you’re not Elizabeth, but you’re Mary?
In Austen’s original novel, Mary Bennet is portrayed as the awkward sister. She tries too hard to impress people and she has a tendency to say the wrong things at the wrong time. But she is compared a lot to her sisters and is treated as the worst out of her five sisters. She wants to be seen as intelligent and accomplished but doesn’t know how to necessarily carry herself. She is the one treated as the odd one out and to society the ugly duckling.
And if we are being honest, most of us have felt more like Mary than Elizabeth at some point.
That is why The Other Bennet Sister by Janice Hadlow feels completely necessary. Hadlow takes Mary’s character and gives her a story that allows her to have interiority, growth, and a chance at love. Instead of being the punchline or the side character to her sister’s stories, Mary becomes the main character of her own.
In the TV show, Mary is played by Ella Bruccoleri. In this show we see Mary being stuck as the middle child seeing her sisters all marrying off wondering when her love story will happen. She loses hope, she ends up leaving her home for Longbourn to escape the pressures of her family to seek independence and find herself. She heads to London and becomes a governess who in search of finding herself, something she least expects finds her along the way: romance.
Mary finds herself in a love triangle with two men, Mr. Hayward played by Dónal Finn and Mr. Ryder played by Laurie Davidson. These men are fighting for Mary’s heart but connect with her in different ways. Mr. Hayward is a poetry and book lover which is something Mary loves, both of them wear glasses, and both are very intellectual people. They exchange books and grow a close friendship that grows into something more. Mr. Hayward is a lawyer who works in London. Mr. Ryder is a high class man in society related to a very rich person named Lady Catherine de Bourgh who is very wealthy and in a high class of society. He also is a lover of poetry and he and Mary bond intellectually, viewing her a kindred soul. He sees himself as a modern man which can be seen as an outsider which he sees in Mary too.
To whom she ends up with is a secret I will never tell, because you should watch it!
What makes Mary’s story compelling is not a dramatic personality shift or a sudden glow up, it is much slower than that, it is uncomfortable and deeply human. She learns that her intellectual mind was never an insecurity. She confronts the resentment that comes from constantly being compared to her sisters. She realizes that being different from her sisters does not make her lesser, it makes her different, and that allows her to step into being more confident in herself and to embrace herself.
In a culture and society that rewards loud confidence and main character energy, Mary represents something softer. She represents the girls who grew into themselves later. The ones who felt left out or not the favorites. The ones who had to build their confidence bit by bit instead of being born with it.
Mary reminds us that growth doesn’t have to be powerful or flashy.
Her journey isn’t about suddenly becoming Elizabeth. It is about becoming fully herself shedding comparison, finding emotional maturity, and understanding that intelligence doesn’t have to be performative to be real.
To me, there is something comforting about a heroine who doesn’t start out as confident. About watching someone start from feeling insecure and awkward, slowly finding themselves and becoming their own, building their confidence by truly loving who they are.
Because not every person is the witty, magnetic sister. Some of us are observant, quiet, and thoughtful. Still becoming.
Maybe the real main character is realizing we are all never meant to be Elizabeth in the first place.
Maybe some of us are meant to be Mary. Who is intelligent, kind, and thoughtful. Who truly, in her story, reclaimed the quiet girl.