‘The Other Bennet Sister’ Will Change How You Feel About Many of Jane Austen’s Classic Characters

Don’t let the title fool you: charming limited series “The Other Bennet Sister” may be centered on the very satisfying coming-of-age of middle sister Mary Bennet (Ella Bruccoleri), but the show takes great pains to add new dimensions to a raft of other classic Jane Austen characters. We’re talking Bennet women and Charlotte Lucas, plus long-time baddie Caroline Bingley for good measure. All of them emerge from the series reoriented and refreshed, though still with much respect paid to Austen herself.

Based on Janice Hadlow’s novel of the same name, the 10-episode series — directed by Jennifer Sheridan and Asim Abbasi — follows young Mary as she strikes out on her own (read: away from her pushy, loving, messy, iconic family) and attempts to find her place in the world. Nine of those episodes were written by Sarah Quintrell (Maddie Dai scripted Episode 4, which will debut on BritBox next week, after an initial rollout of three episodes this week).

Her love affair with Austen and her iconic heroines took a little push (read: financial incentive) to get going, but Quintrell is now a hard-core Austen fan. And it’s that adoration for the source material (and Hadlow’s clever novel) that allowed her to push outside of its usual confines and find new angles to well-loved characters.

“I had this uncle who loved reading and he used to buy us 20 books for birthdays and Christmas that [were] curated to what our interests were,” the writer told IndieWire during a recent interview in New York City. “And he used to hide a five pound check in one book, so you had to read them to find the check and he’d know if you cashed it or not.”

That “really fostered a love of reading” for Quintrell, though she did note with a laugh that she was “after the fiver initially as a small child, and then you get into the habit of reading and reading.”

For one of those holidays, her uncle bought her a collection of Jane Austen books. “I’d sort of left it to one side,” she said. “I just thought, what is this woman going to have to say to me? And I thought it was all going to be a bit posh and a bit twee. But, later, I was making my way through the classics while I was really uninterested in my English A levels, and got to Austen. And I thought, ‘Come on, you have to do this.’ I picked up ‘Emma’ and just was blown away by this character.”

Quintrell found that she “could still recognize these women, even though these novels were 200 years old.” She read every Austen novel, and found that they felt a bit like “a guide to life.” When the opportunity to adapt Hadlow’s novel came to her from producer Jane Tranter,” Quintrell said, Jane simply said, “It’s Mary Bennet from ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ and I was like, ‘Where do I sign?’ It was the fact that it was the story of an outsider, that really spoke to me.”

She’s hardly the only Austen character who gets cast in a new light in “The Other Bennet Sister.” Ahead, Quintrell walks IndieWire through how the series tweaks, alters, and informs new perspective for everyone from Charlotte Lucas to Caroline Bingley and, of course, Mary Bennet herself.

Mary Bennet

‘The Other Bennet Sister’CREDIT LINE:BBC/Bad Wolf

Of course, Mary Bennet is the heart and soul of “The Other Bennet Sister,” but while the series shows her evolution and growth, it was essential to Quintrell that her true essence doesn’t change. She just learns more about it, about life, and about the kind of people who will love and respect her. Even when she’s being a bit of a know-it-all.

“She’s a pedant and she remains a pedant,” Quintrell said. “She remains full of facts. I was very keen to show she has not changed. At the beginning, she’s reading Fordyce’s ‘Sermons for Young Women,’ and it’s a male vicar giving his advice to women on how they should behave. In the middle of the story when she’s grown a bit, she revisits that story and she’s like, ‘Oh, it’s not quite what I remember.’ And by the end, she writes her own advice for young women, not to be published or anything necessarily, but just that it just shows that she’s reached a point in her life where she trusts herself. Those markers of that journey kind of came to me quite early on. It was really important to me that she didn’t change.”

Quintrell also wanted the audience to feel close to Mary through seemingly everyday tasks and undertakings, the kind of stuff we don’t normally see in Austen adaptations. “I have her eating a lot,” she said with a laugh. “Ella, I don’t know how much toast she consumed on set, but it’s a lot, but that felt really important. The perfect world of ‘Pride and Prejudice’ is off to our left, but we’re in the kitchen, we’re in the bedroom. The buttoned up quality of these stories means you can sometimes feel that they’re at a distance, and I want it to feel like Mary’s story would grab us by the heart and drag us in.”

Elizabeth Bennet

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Fans of “Pride and Prejudice” are well-acquainted with older sister Elizabeth Bennet’s own foibles. The pride! The prejudice! But what does that look like to Mary? While the series makes easy work of showing Mary’s outsider status amongst her own family — especially her sisters, who long ago paired off into the Jane and Lizzy unit and the Kitty and Lydia duo — it felt necessary to see that as it applies to one of Austen’s most beloved heroines.

For that, Quintrell turned directly to Austen’s own plotting. “The most brutal thing Lizzy does is at the Netherfield Ball where she has her sister publicly humiliated by their father [when she asks Mr. Bennet to stop Mary from her bad piano forte-playing], but that is Lizzy’s doing, and that was written by Austen herself, that isn’t me or Janice,” she said.

Quintrell’s big change? “It was really important that Lizzy apologized and that Lizzy understood Mary’s point of view. That was one of the things that I wanted to bring to it and add to it, that scene that Mary and Lizzy have in Episode 7 where Mary explains, ‘We’ve had very different experiences of life, you and I.’ And to be able to say that and to be able to get that out? Amazing,” she said. “Lizzy’s not horrible to Mary, but she’s a bit thoughtless in the way that you are when you’re young. It’s not that Lizzy’s deliberately nasty, she’s the most supportive of all of them. With [Mary’s] glasses, she says, ‘I think they look very well.’ But she’s got her own stuff going on, as we all do at that age.”

Mrs. Bennet

‘The Other Bennet Sister’CREDIT LINE:BBC/Bad Wolf/James Pardon

While Ruth Jones’ performance as Mrs. Bennet initially scans as a classic reading of the matriarch — a little brash, a little loud, and relentlessly dedicated to marrying off her daughters — through Mary’s eyes, it becomes far more complicated. Yes, she’s hard on Mary, but the series also takes pains to show the immense pressure she feels to secure suitable stations for her offspring.

“Our reading of Mrs. Bennet has always been, well, Mr. Bennet’s kind of dry and sarcastic and a bit cool, and we love Mr. Bennet and he’s great! Mrs. Bennet? She’s a bit silly and hysterical,” Quintrell said. But when you examine it, this is a mother who’s doing all the emotional labor, whose very existence is under threat once her husband goes. And the five daughters? She’s got to sort that out on her own. The stakes are pretty high. It’s about the survival of the family.”

For a favorite daughter like Lizzy? She can roll her eyes and huff it away. Mary is not granted such luxuries. “In ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ from Lizzy’s point of view, she’s just a bit hysterical and slightly embarrassing sometimes,” the writer said. “From Mary’s point of view, she’s brutal and bruising, but this is why. I think if I’d written this from Mrs. Bennet’s point of view, she might think she’s just a bit flippant with Mary. But when you go back to the original book — and Janice took out all the material that Jane Austen wrote about Mrs. Bennet and Mary’s relationship and used that to kind of build Mrs. Bennet in her novel — that’s where that brutality comes from. Once you remove all the jollity of how she is with some of the others, that’s what you’re left with.”

Charlotte Lucas

One of the most intriguing characters in “The Other Bennet Sister” is none other than Charlotte Lucas, Lizzy’s close friend and Bennet cousin Mr. Collins’ eventual bride. While we’re used to seeing a more meek and mild Charlotte (for this writer, Claudie Blakley’s heartbreaking version in Joe Wright’s 2005 “Pride & Prejudice” has long felt like the gold standard), Anna Fenton-Garvey’s duplicitous and scheming spin on the character is a revelation.

“She could have been the same and it could have been that she just so happened to end up with Mr. Collins,” she said. That’s not what happens here, as Charlotte schemes to a) push Mary to embarrass herself in front of everyone, including Mr. Collins and b) then win him for herself. “I found it quite delicious when I read the novel,” the writer said. “I was really interested in that form of Charlotte.”

It starts early on, when Charlotte attempts a little bit of bonding with Mary over their shared spinster status as the rest of the Bennet sisters delight in their new romantic possibilities. “You know when you’re growing up and you’re not sure of your footing and then your older sister’s friend goes, ‘Yeah, me and you, we’re rubbish, aren’t we? We’re ugly,’ and you’re like, ‘Oh, oh.’ I think we’ve all had experiences like that where someone older just kind of flippantly held us up to the standards that they held themselves up to, put us down in the way they put themselves down,” Quintrell said. “But it’s wounding and you carry it and it takes a lot of unpicking. All of these things that happened to Mary in that first hour, we spend the four hours after unpicking it.”

It’s also essential that Fenton-Garvey’s Charlotte expresses her worldview — and, in many ways, her reasoning for doing what she does to Mary — when she tells the younger Bennet that, for women like them, there are only two options in life. Marriage or misery. And Charlotte is done being miserable. Too bad then that her eventual marriage to Mr. Collins, uh, well, pretty handily combines both states of being.

“That thing about marriage or misery is really important because that’s so thematic, isn’t it, of Jane Austen’s work,” Quintrell said. “I think that Jane Austen herself would have well-recognized that some marriages were miserable. She herself didn’t marry. I like the idea of Charlotte kind of clocking onto that.”

Caroline Bingley

‘The Other Bennet Sister’CREDIT LINE:BBC/Bad Wolf

If Charlotte Lucas is the series’ most unexpected villains, Caroline Bingley (Tanya Reynolds) is its most unexpected heroine. While the icy sister of Charles Bingley (Aled Owens) has traditionally skulked around the Bennets, royally ticked off because Lizzy has made off with Caroline’s long-time crush Mr. Darcy, “The Other Bennet Sister” finds her in a new light. Like Mary, she eventually makes her way to London, where she’s stunned to find that she’s — once again! — forced into seemingly endless social situations with one of those blasted Bennets.

Hadlow had “thought about this woman and what she was up against, having lost out on Darcy, how that affected her relationship going forward after ‘Pride and Prejudice’ with the Bennet family, and how she feels about the Bennet family after that,” Quintrell said. “She’s stuck with these people and they’ve taken away her whole future. In those days, it’s not that you just lose out on a man you fancy, you miss out on your future, your salvation from destitution and difficulty.”

There are, of course, other options available to Caroline. But, it seems, no matter where she goes, boom, there’s another Bennet sister, reminding her of what she lost. Mary might have nothing to do with all that, but Caroline does not see it that way, and the pair continue to butt heads until later in the season.

“She could live with her brother,” Quintrell said. “She’s not going to starve like the Bennets might. But still, it’s so much more than just a guy. It’s pride! It’s your pride and your place in society. I think she always felt like she was for Darcy. So having her kind of resent Mary because of that, I love that, and it feels very truthful.”

Yet, over the course of the series’ ten episodes, and as Caroline and Mary continue to interact in London and even outside the city, we see a different side of Caroline, one genuinely looking for a romantic match, and not afraid to get a bit silly in her pursuits. She’s a far cry from the ice queen we used to know.

“What Tanya brought to the role is the humor, like the eating of the primrose [during a visit to the Lake District],” she said. “When the lads are stretching in that scene, where they’re sort of competing and stretching, and you see her like [trying to stretch too], she’s so brilliantly funny. And I think that just brings a humanity to Caroline, doesn’t it?”

And, in the series’ final moments, even Mary comes to appreciate Caroline’s wacky advocacy for herself and her desires. No spoilers here, but if there is the possibility for another season or even a spinoff of “The Other Bennet Sister,” “The Other Bingley Sister” would do quite well indeed.

The first three episodes of “The Other Bennet Sister” are now streaming on BritBox, with new episodes releasing weekly.