In The Other Bennet Sister, Mary turns out to be a misunderstood work of art

Everywhere you look there’s main character energy. Insecure, cigar-smoking, creatine-fuelled gobshites, grifters and scammers, all vying for that most precious commodity of all – our attention. No wonder our nervous systems are like broken violins and our brains have turned to soup. 

I suppose you could dig a bunker to get away from all the awfulness, but instead I recommend you spend some time with The Other Bennet Sister. Yes, it turns out what we really need is some side character energy. Step forward one of Pride and Prejudice’s most minor players: the bookish and bespectacled Mary Bennet.   

Jane Austen famously had a low opinion of Mary. She drew her as a pedantic, uptight know-nothing who was very bad at piano, ineligible for marriage and boring to boot. The young old maid was always judging her sisters over her Professor Yaffle half-moon spectacles and making unimaginative moral pronouncements. While they bonked Bingley, dallied with Darcy and generally had more fun than she did, she had her nose in a tedious book.

Basically, as far as Austen was concerned, Mary was a stiff and the action was elsewhere.  

Read more:

• It turns out Jane Austen was a secret radical all along
• I’ve written a Jane Austen spinoff for my 80th birthday. Help me sell a million copies
• Jane Austen has become my shelter against a confusing world

But what if, instead of a pious dullard, Mary was simply misunderstood? This adaptation of Janice Ludlow’s novel gives the plainest of literary plain Janes a new life as an awkward outsider struggling with social norms. Potentially neurodivergent, she picks furiously at her nails, always says the wrong thing and can’t figure out how everything is supposed to work. She’s the ultimate low-key teen rebel, and I couldn’t love her more. 

Ella Bruccoleri plays Mary with blushing, dry-mouthed vulnerability and absolutely nails her determined but ungainly body language. You are fully on side with her from the get-go. When she doesn’t understand the etiquette of courtship and dances THREE times with her optician, we also think those rules are silly.

Ruth Jones – who plays Mrs Bennet like the Kris Jenner of her day, momaging furiously at balls and masterminding the Q2 family marriage strategy – is constantly disappointed with her, and it crushes our spirits, too. And when her father Mr Bennet (Richard E Grant) finally reads his last newspaper, we’re also filled with anxiety about what Mary should do next.    

I’m finding the series completely delightful, but not in a fussy, teapots-and-crumpets kind of way. It just all works seamlessly. In fact, I think I might like this take on Pride and Prejudice better than I like the original. There are far too many annoying men in that, all of them getting away with murder. 

I’d much rather watch Mary coming into her own, learning what a sense of humour is and choosing some lurid crimson fabric with frog-green trim for her London debut. I want to see her make friends and mistakes and find love, and I am fully committed to her happiness. 

And it’s such a joy to see a period drama with a modern sensibility that isn’t being try-hard, full of heaving cleavage and courtly dances soundtracked by Ariana Grande. 

It’s also doing me a bit of good. When I started watching this, the mental health benefits kicked in straight away. Brain fog cleared, my shoulders dropped and my heart rate slowed to the steady pace of a carriage on its way to Pemberley.

Because it’s wonderful to discover what happens when you divert your attention away from what everyone else wants you to look at. I mean, of course Mary was the most interesting character. All we had to do was ignore Darcy’s bulging breeches for a minute and examine her under the light.

In The Other Bennet Sister, she finally gets her day in the sun, and what a work of art she is.

The Other Bennet Sisteris on BBC iPlayer. Lucy Sweet is a freelance journalist and copywriter

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