The Other Bennet Sister, Episode 3 — Recap: London, and a Kindred Spirit
Opens on: “The loss of my father was a leap into the unknown.”
What happened
The below summary might be viewed as spoilery
The episode opens very strong. We see Mrs Bennet and the sisters sitting in the living room, all dressed in black. Mrs Bennet crying and the sisters fussing over her with Mary’s wonderful narration over it. Then, Mr Collins and his wife Charlotte Lucas barge in. They of course are the new owners of Longbourn.
Mr Collins gives them two weeks to pack up and leave!
The story finally leaves Longbourn and, honestly, so does some of the weight on Mary’s shoulders. Mary’s sent to London to become a governess for the Gardiners.
Mary arrives at the Gardiners’ and the difference is immediate. Her aunt and uncle actually look at her when she speaks. Not in the way one looks at a family inconvenience, or a daughter who has failed to be decorative enough, but as a person who might have something to say.
“And how are you, Mary?”
It should not feel revolutionary. In this family, it does.
The Gardiners do not magically turn Mary into a different person. That would be too easy, and it would not be very Mary. She is still stiff. Still watchful. Still prepared for embarrassment before anyone has offered it. But the episode gives her something she has not had much of: ease.
We get the sense that Mary does not quite know what to do with kindness when it is not attached to correction. Mrs Gardiner is not trying to sand her down into a more marriageable shape. Mr Gardiner is not making sport of her seriousness. They are simply making room.
It puts you as the viewer on an emotional rollercoaster, because we are so firmly in Mary’s camp by now, and her trauma is our trauma.
Then comes Tom Hayward, carrying charm, poetry and intelligence Mary can relate to.
Tom’s enthusiasm is very different from the kind of attention Mary is used to. Mr Sparrow admired her, which was sweet but frightening. Mr Collins praised her exactness, which was about as romantic as a well-filed receipt. Tom does something stranger. He treats Mary’s seriousness as a conversation starter, not a defect. He hears Mary talking politics and follows the thread instead of treating it as something odd to be endured.
That is the cleverness of the Tom scenes. They are not simply romantic because a man has appeared and looked at Mary with interest. They matter because he puts pressure on the exact rule Mary made for herself after Meryton: think more, feel less.
Tom is much more comfortable with feeling than Mary is. He is a barrister, but “poetry is my passion.” He does not treat a poem as something to pick apart safely from a distance. He wants it to move you.
Mary would very much prefer not to let it.
He even jokes that the right book might “open the heart of Miss Mary Bennet!” It is playful, but it lands exactly where Mary is most guarded.
And then the episode gives her something almost as rare as romance: a friend.
Miss Ann Baxter arrives like a small mercy. She and Mary bond over the shared agony of dinner-party small talk, and for once Mary is not the oddest person in the room by herself.
After Mary accidentally turns a polite introduction into a story about choking, Ann does not recoil. She understands the horror of these rooms immediately: “I HATE the first 20 minutes…”
This is where the episode really starts to show what London can do for Mary. It does not fix her. Thank goodness. A fixed Mary would be less interesting. Instead, London lets her encounter people who are not invested in keeping her small. The Gardiners give her steadiness. Tom gives her feeling. Ann gives her companionship.
Mary can see that she might be allowed to change, and she starts to feel something long forgotten: “Hope.”
BUT, it wouldn’t be proper Austen-inspired drama if she (and we) weren’t dragged back down to earth.
Miss Baxter wants to introduce Mary to a gentleman, “We have something of an understanding.”
And who is that but Mr Tom Hayward. “We are hoping to be married next year.”
There is still hope for her yet because as Mary puts it:
“But I had made friends and that…was enough.”
The first three episodes do really well to establish the series. The writing does well to build up the characters, but does so without distracting from Mary’s character building. We get to experience her emotions and feel them ourselves. By the end of the third episode we are all rooting for her.