Mary Bennet Finally Gets Her Moment in the Sun

{In Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Mary Bennet was always the forgettable sister—the plain one who compensated for her looks with pedantic lectures nobody asked for. Austen herself seemed to dismiss her with a shrug, marrying off the other four sisters and leaving Mary to fade into spinsterdom as Mrs. Bennet’s unpaid companion. But what if Mary was never the problem? What if a lifetime of being measured against her siblings’beauty and charm had simply crushed something essential in her, something that might bloom if anyone ever bothered to look?

That’s the premise behind The Other Bennet Sister, now streaming on BritBox in the U.S., and it’s a gamble that pays off brilliantly. Based on Janice Hadlow’s 2020 bestselling novel of the same name, this BBC One miniseries takes a peripheral character and asks a deceptively simple question: what if the girl who grew up gray could learn to be bright?

The show accomplishes this by compressing the darker early chapters of Hadlow’s novel—the family dysfunction that shaped Mary’s insecurity—and fast-forwarding to the part that actually heals her: time spent with her uncle and aunt, Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner, played with warmth and generosity by Richard Coyle and Indira Varma. These are people who belong to trade rather than inherited wealth, who live in London rather than provincial Meryton, and who, crucially, host gatherings where nobody is obliged to sparkle. It’s in this space of permission that Mary begins to shed her defensive pedantry and discover who she might actually be.

Ella Bruccoleri carries the entire arc on her shoulders, and she’s magnificent. She wears spectacles that dim her light, walks with ungainly awkwardness, and delivers her pompous lines with an almost apologetic hesitance that somehow makes Mary more human than any number of conventionally pretty actresses could manage. When her mother criticizes her even while Mary agrees with her, snapping“It’s the way you say things,”you feel the accumulation of every small rejection this girl has absorbed. But then Bruccoleri cracks open a smile, and it’s the smile of someone who’s just been told“I am so sorry that anyone has made you feel like a disappointment,”and the sky opens.

The show also resists the modern compulsion to justify everything through romance. Yes, there’s a love triangle involving a poetry-loving lawyer (Dónal Finn) and a charismatic gadabout (Laurie Davidson), but what makes the show sing isn’t sexual tension—it’s the non-sexual awakenings. It’s Hayward teaching Mary to play graces, or the two of them dorkily mimicking bird calls, or Mary dissolving in laughter on the dance floor. This is what happens when someone gives a person permission to be themselves without performing.

Some Austen purists bristle at the entire Mary rehab project, arguing that the canonical Mary is meant to be insufferably moralistic, not a self-insert for introverts. There’s something to that. But The Other Bennet Sister is so breezy and full of heart that such objections feel beside the point. The show understands something deeper: that cruelty often looks like kindness when you’re looking from the outside, and that sometimes the plainest person in the room is actually just the loneliest.}