Background Characters, Too, Have Feelings

Turns out the extras in literature are doing a lot more than we thought

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

There are books you read. There are books you reread. Then there are books that quietly rearrange the furniture in your mind so thoroughly that, when you return to an old favourite, you discover someone has moved the sofa.

That was my experience after reading Janice Hadlow’s The Other Bennet Sister, a novel that gently takes the hand of Jane Austen’s most neglected character and pulls her from the margins into the light. Not long after turning the final page, I found myself watching the BBC adaptation of the same.

After considerable scholarly reflection, which looked suspiciously like sitting on the sofa with a warm cup of tea, I have concluded that either order is perfectly acceptable. Read first if you enjoy discovering characters from the inside out. Watch first if you prefer the immediate texture of faces, costumes, and beautifully judgmental rooms.

In either case, there is only one inevitable destination; you will end up reopening Pride and Prejudice, but that rereading will feel strangely, permanently altered.

Poor Mary Bennet. In the original architecture of Jane Austen’s masterpiece, she exists largely as a structural counterweight. Jane is blessed with sweetness; Elizabeth inherits glittering wit; Lydia claims wild, reckless excitement; and Kitty occupies the blurry space of proximity to Lydia.

And Mary? Mary gets a footnote. She is the family expert on subjects nobody asked about. She practices the piano with heroic confidence and severely limited success. She dispenses heavy moral observations that no one is interested in hearing. For over two centuries, she has been the designated “boring sister”, the comic relief wrapped in a dreary pelisse.

One of the great pleasures of The Other Bennet Sister is that it does not argue Jane Austen was wrong. Instead, it argues that two centuries of readers may have been looking at the wrong part of the room. The novel invites us to cross the floor and stand directly beside Mary instead of snickering from across the parlor.

Suddenly, the earnest speeches feel less ridiculous. The social awkwardness feels painfully familiar. The desperate desire to matter no longer looks like a comic defect, but a recognizably human coping mechanism.

Whenever we read Austen or any fine novel, there is an unspoken agreement that we should align ourselves with the heroine. We want to believe we possess Elizabeth’s quick tongue, her easy grace, and her ability to laugh off the absurdities of the world. However, if we are fiercely honest with ourselves, the reality is far more humbling.

Who among us has never tried a little too hard to appear clever when feeling deeply insecure? Who has never said the wrong thing with the absolute best of intentions? Who has not occasionally mistaken being informative for being interesting?

If you answered “never,” congratulations; you are probably Elizabeth Bennet, floating effortlessly through society. The rest of us are scattered somewhere along the Mary spectrum. We are the ones who over explain a niche topic at a party because small talk feels like a foreign language, or who bury ourselves in tasks and books to hide the fact that we don’t know how to mix with the crowd.

When I reopened Pride and Prejudice after spending time in Mary’s world, I expected the same comfort-read I had always loved. Instead, I found new shadows stretching across familiar scenes.

Elizabeth remained delightful, and Mr. Darcy remained gloriously, frictionally awkward. Mrs. Bennet remained an unstoppable force of nature whose sheer conversational volume could probably alter local weather patterns. But Mary no longer wandered through the background as a two-dimensional punchline. Every time she appeared on the page, she carried an unexpected hint of loneliness.

Once your eyes are adjusted to Mary’s frequency, you begin to notice the quiet cruelties of the Longbourn household. Specifically, you notice how often Mary is interrupted.

When Mr. Bennet delivers his famously dry quip, “Let us hear no more of your books; they are very well, but there must be a period to all study,” the room laughs. We, the readers, have historically laughed with them. But under a kinder lens, it ceases to be a sharp bit of paternal wit. It becomes the public, crushing silencing of the only daughter who actually tried to connect on an intellectual level.

Mary isn’t trying to be annoying; she is trying to be useful. She is a girl trying to find a structure, a rigid set of rules and moral maxims, to make sense of a chaotic, shallow world that values a fine complexion and a flirtatious giggle over a well-stocked mind.

Lacking the natural beauty of Jane or the innate charm of Elizabeth, she turned to intellect as a shield. Her pomposity wasn’t arrogance; it was a fortress built to protect a heart that knew it was unseen.

Rereading a classic after a brilliant piece of revisionist fiction is a little like visiting your childhood home as an adult. The rooms are exactly where they always were. The walls haven’t moved an inch. Yet, everything looks profoundly different.

You notice the architectural details you rushed past in your youth. Characters who barely registered on your first pass suddenly become unforgettable. Even the jokes land differently, because your gaze is no longer locked entirely on the couple dancing in the center of the ballroom; your eyes keep drifting to the girl standing silently at the very edge of the conversation.

There is always a temptation, whenever a beloved classic is retold or adapted, to ask a highly competitive question…Does the new version improve upon the old?

Literature is not a zero-sum game, and I suspect that is entirely the wrong metric. The truer, better question is whether the retelling sends us gratefully, hungrily back to the source material. It forces us to look past the tidy resolutions of the plot and ask: Happily ever after… but for whom?

In my case, it certainly did. I returned to the text expecting to revisit Elizabeth Bennet, but I found myself quietly watching Mary. I had finally noticed that she had always been there, waiting to be seen.

Perhaps that is the finest compliment one book can ever pay to another. A great retelling does not persuade us to close the original forever. It does something far more generous; it sends us back with kinder eyes.

That, ultimately, may be the greatest gift literature has to offer. It does not always need to hand us new stories. Often, its highest calling is to give us new ways of seeing old ones and, in the process, teaching us how to see each other. After all, every story has someone who effortlessly commands the room. And every story has someone quietly practicing in the next room, hoping just once that someone might stop long enough to listen.

One begins to wonder about all the people politely waiting in the margins of literature. What might The Count of Monte Cristo become if we followed Mercedes instead of Edmond Dantes, watching the slow cost of waiting, grieving, and rebuilding a life? What went through the mind of the "Mad Priest" during those fourteen years of solitary digging, pouring an entire lifetime of brilliant philosophy, science, and languages into a young, broken sailor, Edmond Dantes who would eventually use that knowledge to destroy lives?

How differently might we read Les Miserables if Javert were allowed to narrate his own story? What untold corners of Oliver Twist lie behind Nancy’s courage, or Mr. Brownlow’s quiet compassion? And what forgotten hopes and disappointments might emerge if one of the overlooked souls in Little Dorrit were finally invited to speak?

The greatest novels are rarely exhausted by a single reading because they are rarely inhabited by a single life. The heroes may carry the plot, but it is often the quiet characters who carry the heart. They are always there, waiting in the margins, for someone to finally turn the page and look.

Bye!

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Edited for Restless Quills by Zoe Dixon