It’s a truth universally acknowledged that despite Pride and Prejudice being published over 200 years ago, fans still can’t get enough of Jane Austen’s seminal novel – or its various spin-offs.
The classic love story of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy has spawned several adaptations – from the 1995 Colin Firth series and Netflix’s upcoming drama to the loosely inspired Bridget Jones’s Diary– but also countless retellings and unofficial sequels, with Janice Hadlow’s The Other Bennet Sister being one of them.
The 2020 novel, which made its way to BBC One earlier this month, looks at the events of Austen’s original from the perspective of Elizabeth’s sister Mary, played by Call the Midwife’s Ella Bruccoleri. While portrayed as socially awkward, bookish and attention-seeking in Pride and Prejudice, here the Bennet sister is seen through a more sympathetic lens as she attempts to find romance despite being constantly underestimated by her family.
Unsurprisingly, the adaptation has proved to be divisive among fans – with some delighted to see the Bennets back on our screens while others accuse it of straying too far from the source material. However, it seems that Austen academics are more open-minded when it comes to fan fiction inspired by the iconic author.
“In some ways I think the Jane Austen spin-offs interest me more than the Jane Austen adaptations actually,” John Mullan, a professor of English Literature at UCL, tells The Independent. “They are always somebody’s take on Jane Austen, and because they’re spin-offs, I don’t have to watch them flinching at all the things that they’ve got wrong.
“I feel less defensive about them than I do about the adaptations so I’m not an antagonist to spin-offs at all. The bottom line is – Jane Austen will survive it all.”
Janet Todd OBE, a Cambridge professor and author of Living with Jane Austen, says it’s “fair enough” for fans to put their own spin on Austen’s material. “She’s a national treasure and I think you can do with it what you want,” she adds. “I think the danger is if people mistake it for the actual Jane Austen novel and assume that it’s very similar to it.
“On the whole, I am not the audience for fan fiction and spin-offs simply because I do love the books and I actually find that I can read them over and over again – and I’d rather do that.”
The Other Bennet Sister is the first Pride and Prejudice spin-off to air on the BBC in a while, with the last being an adaptation of PD James’ Death Comes to Pemberley in 2013. However, English Literature scholar Dr John Lennard stresses that the amount of fan fiction inspired by the novel has been on the rise since the early 20th century.
“There is a lot of Jane Austen fic,” he says. “Although 95 per cent of it is Elizabeth and Darcy because they’re the sexy ones and a lot of the rest is Jane, sometimes Bingley depending on how people feel about him being a spineless twit – but the others have all received attention.
“Mildly rescuing Mary in one way or another and saying that she’s not boring at all is almost normal, it’s very common indeed.”
While Lennard notes that many academic scholars can be “at best snooty but often quite sneery” about Austen fan fiction, he believes that it’s a great way to encourage people to read the originals.
“We spend our time trying really hard to get kids to be interested in reading classical literature and respond to it in writing – well, here are all these kids who are reading classical literature or other literature and responding to it in writing, and sometimes quite well,” he says.
“I don’t want to replace every essay with fan fiction, but I myself would not mind, if I’m teaching Jane Austen, for one essay in the course to be to try writing a pastiche of the style. It makes you look at it really closely, which is the whole point
“I have no problem with it – I’m interested in it. I’ve been reading fic for 20 years now since I stumbled into it and went, ‘What the hell is this? What are these 250,000 works in a universe I know really well and didn’t know existed?’”
As for The Other Bennet Sister, the portrayal of Mary here is much kinder than in Austen’s original – which may be down to viewing the story through a 21st century lens, Todd says.
“Pride and Prejudice mocks the ‘blue stocking’ woman – we’d call her now a classroom swot or a nerd – but we live in a much gentler, sentimental times than Austen and we no longer mock that type,” she says. “So the character we’ve got on screen is not the woman in the book, who is a rather foolish girl who wants to be noticed in this big family by showing off. In the series, she becomes the spurned victim of a really nasty family.
“I didn’t not enjoy it, but I disliked the endless repetition of Mary being humiliated, the stresses on her total lack of marriage prospects.”
Mullan adds: “Readings over the recent decades have sided in a feminist way with one of those characters in the novel who’s actually laughed at – Mrs Bennet, Mary Bennet, Charlotte Lucas. But that’s entirely to do with us, it’s nothing to do with Jane Austen.
“Some of the sympathetic readings seem to me just completely wrong. The show says it’s Elizabeth Bennet’s overlooked sister but the point is that they’re all overlooked except Elizabeth in a way because we never enter the consciousness of any of them except Elizabeth. Even Jane – who features quite a lot – we don’t know what it’s like to be in her head. Whereas we know very well what it’s like to be in Elizabeth’s head and it’s the novel’s triumph.”
Austen’s work continues to inspire fan fiction hundreds of years on – but what’s the secret behind Pride and Prejudice’s seemingly endless potential for spin-offs? “It’s the absolute romance, isn’t it?” Todd says. “The formula is a winning one and it goes on through just about everything – whether it’s Daphne du Maurier and Georgette Heyer’s work or even Fifty Shades of Grey. It’s a female fantasy and it’s a very strong one.”
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