There’s Something About Mary Bennet

Poor Mary. When she pays attention to her at all, Pride and Prejudice’s narrator describes the middle Bennet sibling—younger sister to Jane and Elizabeth, older sister to Kitty and Lydia—as someone who, possessing neither “genius nor taste,” often “wished to say something very sensible,” but—oof—“knew not how.” Mary navigates the world with “a pedantic air and conceited manner, which would have injured a higher degree of excellence than she had reached.” (Ooooof.) A little bit Mr. Collins, a little bit Lady Edith, a little bit Tracy Flick, Mary is at once introverted and attention-hungry, well-read and insipid, vain and insignificant. She is also, her novel’s acerbic storyteller makes a point of informing us, “the only plain one in the family.”

In spite of all this, though, recent years have seen a proliferation of Mary-related—and, indeed, Mary-focused—fiction. There’s 2009’s , an exploration of the escapades Mary enjoyed after her sisters wereThere’s