The Other Bennet Sister starts tonight on BBC1 8pm

[IwantToRetire]

Seemingly unremarkable and often overlooked, Mary Bennet longs to win her family’s approval.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002qkp3

Is this going to be a spoof or some sort of spin off ?

2nd episode tonight at 8:30

Couldn't see a thread so hope this isn't a duplicate!

I think Miss Bingley was mean/nasty about all of the Bennets wasn't she?

I think that's her inferiority due to her father having been in trade perhaps.

I never thought of her like that.
She is a pragmatist - entering the marriage for practical reasons - so she won’t be poor and can have children, rather than for love. I think her reasons for doing this are more sad than anything: she is older than the others, and plain, so she doesn’t believe she will find anyone else.
I don’t mind the Other Bennet Sister’s new version of Charlotte (as a hard faced schemer) but it is a departure from the original.

I too am Team Lucas. She’s a pragmatist.

I don't think she is. She's a realist. And knew her chances of snaring a husband weren't very high. So she grabbed Mr Collins when she could even though he was a total pain. She didn't want to end up a spinster relying on her parents. And then when her parents died where would she go.

Yes I agree, but I'm pretty sure Austen was saying something by showing her diving in there to snag her man the instant he's been rejected by another. After all she (Austen) was in a similar position: no home of her own, reliant on the charity of her brothers and could have married, but didn't.

Anyway, it's rather wonderful that we can still speculate about her characters and their motivations hundreds of years later. What a genius.

I'm going to dust off my viola tomorrow and learn that theme tune. I liked it a lot.

I’ve really enjoyed this. And just started reading Introducing Mrs Collins, a novel about Charlotte’s life with Mr C.

Tanya Reynolds as Caroline Bingley was the highlight of the whole series for me. Absolutely hilarious!

i like how Lucy Briers played Mary in P & P 1995 and Mrs Hill in this,

That was such a nice touch, especially to show her reading the letter at the end.

I didn’t realise she wad the same actress. How lovely!

and Indira Varma was Caroline Bingley's character - Kiran- in Bride and Prejudice, and now Mary's aunt, Mrs Gardiner - a mellowed character

It was a lovely easy watch.

She was suited to Tom, although I did have a smile at the thought of her as mistress of Rosings.

Another nephew married to a Bennet😁

I did wonder at the portrayal of Mr Ryder though.

Surely to ask Mary to run away with him & live together puts him morally on the level of Wickham?

And why would she even have considered it after what it put the family through?

Then to propose when he realised she like Hayward?

He was just toying with her wasn't he?

I binged on the second half last night.

I think they should have done more discussion about Mr Ryder's scandalous proposal. The timeframe for when this was set - a few years after P&P which takes place around 1812, fits with when Mary Shelley (At the time Mary Godwin) was doing something rather similar with Percy Bysshe Shelley (they married a few years later). I would have appreciated a short statement about how living free is all very well for a man who is able to be free, but no one can free a woman of the consequences of what happens to her if she is unwed with a small baby and abandonned by the romantic fool who swept her off her feet but got bored with the humdrum existence of day to day life when she's looking after the baby instead of reading poetry with him.

I do not get why no one managed or even bothered to try to tell Mrs Bennett that Mr Ryder was proposing a scandal rather than a marriage.

Mary said exactly that in her response to Mr Ryder's suggestion. She was very clear about the impact on the woman and how she would be left carrying the burden, literally as well as metaphorically. That's how she turned him down.

I don't think she was that explicit. She talked of the expectations of society but it came across as being more about embracing conventionality than about his blindness to the reality of living as a woman under a patriarchy.

I took everything you wanted to hear stated from Mary’s response to Ryder, @CandyEnclosingInvisible.

I do not get why no one managed or even bothered to try to tell Mrs Bennett that Mr Ryder was proposing a scandal rather than a marriage.

I wondered about that also.

She'd maybe have said it turned out OK for Lydia🙄

She was so downright nasty in this.

Saying how stressful it was & that the girls must marry well.

That Mary would be dependant on others, although she seemed to be coping well enough!

No, she was explicit. She said clearly about how a man can flount such conventions, but not a woman and she can be left in a vulnerable situation, shunned by society, perhaps with a child.

Yes, me too, and I thought Mary was very clear on this.

and Mary's sister was also very negative about the whole deal, not sure if that was Lizzie or Jane at that point

I think that was Lizzie? She came in the bedroom to talk to Mary about the "proposal".

Surely to ask Mary to run away with him and live together puts him morally on the level of Wickham?

I think not quite, Diddl, because Wickham was more of an opportunist and I think Mr. Ryder would have intended to stay with her but was carried away with the fashions of the day. I am not sure of the dates but it was, as someone has already said, the time of Shelley and Keats and that boy who put it around quite a lot, Lord Byron. They were once described in a Blackadder episode as poets in big white shirts going round Italy, trying to get laid. Wordsworth had an illegitimate child with someone before he came back home and married and got his sister to make the bread and paper the walls and write all his poems but that is only my allegation and it's a de-rail so don't go there.

Did Mr. Rochester want to run away to Italy with Jane Eyre when she found out that he was married? Was that in the book?

Yes, I think you're right. He wanted to carry on with their plans, after the discovery of Bertha.

I missed the buttercup. I'm on about episode 8 of the second watch so I'll look out for it.