To be a clever, bookish teenage girl is to spend a certain amount of time standing on the sidelines, feeling invisible to boys. When I was at school, there seemed to be a natural division: you could be smart or pretty, but you could not be both. Of course, there were girls who were indeed both, but they either intentionally dumbed themselves down or spent an inordinate amount of time trying to make themselves beautiful. (Perhaps other schools and other early-2000s teenagehoods were different, but that was the reality of mine.)
The Other Bennet Sister – a new BBC costume adaptation of Janice Hadlow’s 2020 novel telling the story of Mary, the intelligent, bespectacled, painfully shy sister to Pride and Prejudice heroine Lizzy – sent me right back to that awkward age. That’s how vividly it conjures the extreme lack of confidence that can come from being sidelined, whether by one’s peers or, as in Mary’s case, one’s own mother. Watching Ella Bruccoleri’s excellent performance reunited me with those awful feelings of shyness and exclusion, of walking with your head down in the hope that no one notices you. “Why do you walk like that?” I remember a popular, vivacious girl in my year asking me, not unkindly. She couldn’t comprehend what it meant to walk with such a lack of confidence. I wished I could borrow even a pinch of hers.
