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    The Forgotten Sister: Mary Bennet's Pride and Prejudice
    The Forgotten Sister: Mary Bennet's Pride and Prejudice
    The Forgotten Sister: Mary Bennet's Pride and Prejudice
    Audiobook10 hours

    The Forgotten Sister: Mary Bennet's Pride and Prejudice

    Written by Jennifer Paynter

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    The third Bennet sister, Mary, steps into the spotlight in this graceful retelling of Pride and Prejudice.

    As a middle child flanked by two pairs of closely bonded sisters, marginalized by her mother, and ridiculed by her father, Mary Bennet feels isolated within her own family. She retreats to her room to read and play the pianoforte and, when obliged to mix in society, finds it safer to quote platitudes from books rather than express her real opinions. She also finds it safer to befriend those who are socially “beneath” her. When wealthy Mr. Darcy and Mr. Bingley glide into her sisters’ lives, Mary becomes infuated with an impoverished young musician, the son of her old wet-nurse, who plays the fiddle at the Meryton assemblies.

    It is only after her sisters tease her about her “beau with the bow” that Mary is forced to examine her real feelings and confront her own brand of pride and prejudice.

    An elegant accompaniment to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, The Forgotten Sister plucks the neglected Mary from obscurity and beautifully reveals her hopes and dreams.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateFeb 25, 2014
    ISBN9781480567450
    The Forgotten Sister: Mary Bennet's Pride and Prejudice
    Author

    Jennifer Paynter

    Jennifer Paynter is the author of the plays God’s People, Balancing Act, and When Are We Going to Manly? , the last being nominated for a Sydney Theatre Critics’ Circle Award and the NSW Premiere’s Literary Award. Her plays have been produced in Sydney and Canberra and for ABC Radio, and her short story “The Sad Heart of Ruth” is an ABC Bicentennial Award winner. The Sydney Morning Herald hails the Australian edition of The Forgotten Sister as an “impressive literary achievement and a delightful read,” and the Brisbane Courier Mail says it “succeeds in inviting us back into the world of Longbourn and the Bennet family and their preoccupation with marriage, money and social class.” Paynter lives in Australia with her family.

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    Reviews for The Forgotten Sister

    3.5/5

    36 ratings9 reviews

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    • 4/5
      I loved the recording and felt the narrator did a wonderful job. The story was a bit different than I expected but I quite enjoyed it.
    • 4/5
      Interesting rendition of Pride and Prejudice written from the perspective of Mary, the third sister. It provides background to Mary’s character and reactions and has the added bonus to take us to Australia when it was still a penal colony. Mary is marginalized within her own family with her father ridiculing her, and her sisters bonding in pairs, leaving her out. She has to forge her own way towards fulfillment and finding her own self-worth.
    • 4/5
      One of the better sequels to P&P. It is not too infected with modernity as the author seems well read to the period. She also manages to portray Mary as ‘not like the other girls’ without falling into the many of the obvious and tedious traps of that genre. The narrator is pleasing as well.
    • 5/5
      This re-read of a P&P variation concerns the life of Mary Bennet. Not close to the two oldest or the two youngest Bennet sisters, Mary feels her isolation, compounded by her distance from her parents. We see the society of Longbourn and Meryton from another viewpoint as Mary's feelings, hopes and her dreams are revealed to us. From her early life, through the story of P&P, and then several years beyond.
      An enjoyable and interesting well-written read of a story from one of the overlooked characters from Pride and Prejudice.
    • 3/5
      What an odd book. It's a truth universally etc. etc. that Jane Austen continuations and retellings are hit or miss – mostly miss – and heaven knows that Pride & Prejudice especially has been told from every point of view except the horse that draws the Bennets' gig. I was intrigued by this one because it focuses on the forgotten sister: Mary. Come on, Goodreaders, admit it – we all want to be Lizzie or Jane, but when you get right down to it how many of us are probably more Mary than we'd like to admit? Poor Mary, inept and mocked. I wanted to see the story from her point of view. This… was not what I expected. It begins with a childhood filled with "there's something wrong with that girl", doctors and Edwardian psychological treatments that might as well have been medieval (s&m therapy: "and he moved to dripping hot wax onto my palms in the hope that the pain thus caused would distract me from the pain within my mind"). In this story there is yet another girl victimized by Wickham, to whom Elizabeth et al are oblivious because of their focus on their own dramas. The problem with that is that it means yet another person knows what Wickham is and does nothing, so what happens with Lydia actually manages to be even worse. (And then of course Mary blames Elizabeth, and just lost any sympathy I might have scraped up for her.) Elizabeth does not come off well in this telling. "She did not like people to know how hard she worked, either at her music or her Italian, and would turn away compliments with self-deprecating humor" – she spends hours practicing, then lies about it to make herself look more gifted? That's terrible. The author has to go through some calisthenics to bend the story to Mary's point of view. After all, quite a bit of the tale involves only Elizabeth and Jane, or Elizabeth and Darcy. But Lizzy carelessly puts Darcy's letter in a book, and Mary finds it.And all of the extra passages – about Edwardian psychiatric treatment, and where Mary ends up in the end … it wasn't credible. Pity.
    • 1/5
      I read 50 pages and it was so amazing bad I couldn't read anymore.Which is weird for me because I usually read around a 100 pages before giving up.This book wasn't true to the characters of the original novel and I hated how the author portrayed Mary.So this is a DNF for me.I am very happy I only payed a 2 bucks for it.If you like your JA fan fiction true to the characters don't read this book.
    • 5/5
      With only half a dozen speeches in Pride and Prejudice Mary Bennet still manages to make an impression. Bookish, socially awkward, and prone to moralizing, it’s hard to picture her as the heroine of a romance novel. Though I’d laugh along at her cluelessness Mary has always had my sympathy, so when I discovered Jennifer Paynter’s The Forgotten Sister: Mary Bennet’s Pride and Prejudice I couldn’t wait to read it. Would this book rescue Mary from the shadows of Pride and Prejudice? I hoped so.The Forgotten Sister opens before the events of Pride and Prejudice, with Mary recounting her story in her own words. She begins with an admission of early worries, “For the best part of nine years--from the age of four until just before I turned thirteen--I prayed for a brother every night.” (8) By then family life is strained, but early on Mr. and Mrs. Bennet are carefree and happy. Young Jane and Elizabeth are doted on by their parents, who are optimistic there is still time to produce a male heir and secure their entailed estate. Everything changes though when Mary, a third daughter, is born. Worries set in. The Bennets begin bickering. About a month after Mary’s birth Mrs. Bennet has an attack of nerves so acute that Mary is sent away to a wet-nurse, Mrs. Bushell, with whom she stays for several years. From then on, neglect by and separation from her family become recurring patterns in Mary’s life. The Forgotten Sister provides new background to explain Mary’s personality. A frightening encounter when she is young makes her timid and tongue tied. The kindness shown by her pious instructor pushes Mary toward rigid religious beliefs, though the harsh moralizing mini-sermons she sometimes gives are just an awkward girl’s attempt to join the conversation. Because all four of her four sisters are paired in close bonds, Elizabeth with Jane and Lydia with Kitty, Mary is left without a close companion in the family, and being often on her own does not help her acquire social skills. At the assembly dance where Jane catches the eye of Bingley and Elizabeth begins her antipathy for Darcy, Mary has her own pivotal encounter. She bumps into the handsome son of her former wet-nurse as he races up the stairs to join his band, and then Mary can’t stop trying to spot Peter Bushell through the crowd. Though far beneath Mary in station he’s a talented musician. When their eyes meet as he is playing his fiddle he smiles and, she cannot help herself, she smiles back, though she then resolves to look at him no further because she “…could not possibly befriend a person of his order.” (110)But Peter is kind during their brief encounters, leaving Mary alternately relaxed and flustered. Though her feelings are decidedly mixed she’s left with a strong desire to see him again. But would it be proper? Mary’s religion councils her that all people are equal in the eyes of God, but that’s not what society says. Increasingly drawn to Peter, Mary remains deeply divided. How does an inexperienced, devout girl decide what to do?The unique slant and moving insights of The Forgotten Sister: Mary Bennet’s Pride and Prejudice kept the book in my hands any moment I had free. It’s fascinating to see younger versions of the characters from Pride and Prejudice, and events that took place before and after that story. I love when a novel incorporates fascinating bits of history or offers vicarious travel pleasures, and The Forgotten Sister has the surprising bonus of taking us by ship around the world to rough and tumble Australia when it is still part penal colony. Still, Mary was difficult for me to like in the early pages of the book. Her feelings of anger and resentment toward her family are understandable, she’s often left out and sometimes ridiculed, but her spite could be hard to take. And my beloved Elizabeth when seen through Mary’s eyes does not seem quite as wonderful as before, which is disconcerting. But the realism of Mary’s character and feelings ultimately adds to the strength of the novel. And there’s good precedent in the original for enlivening the story by shaking up the reader’s comfortable notions. The first time I read Pride and Prejudice I abhorred Darcy just as much as Elizabeth did, so when he handed her that letter after his disastrous proposal at Hunsford Parsonage, I was as shocked and disoriented as she was. The Forgotten Sister provides some of that same, wonderful eye opening catharsis, and by the end of the book Mary has a new and promising future.
    • 4/5
      So I loathed PD James' appallingly inept attempt at a Pride & Prejudice sequel, but it's not because I'm a purist. Here's the proof: I enjoyed this charming little pastiche very much. It's by an Australian author, and focusses on Mary, the middle sister. The writing style is simple and elegant, fitting well in to Austen's world without becoming a parody. It's a little bit raunchier and a whole lot more class-critical than the great Jane, but then Paynter is writing for a 21st century audience. And we even make it to Australia - there's a convict in the cast of characters. Mary is re-imagined here as not just clever, pious and bookish, but also socially inept and isolated. She's the odd one out, as her 4 sisters pair up in their duos. Her clumsy overblown statements in P&P are still there, but framed as missteps or undetected sarcasm from the geek-girl. The other characters are there without too much twist. It's a very nice and enjoyable piece of fan fic.
    • 4/5
      Mary Bennet is a novel with an interesting perspective on a popular classic. The story of Pride and Prejudice has been subject to many sequels, adaptions and reworkings, and in this novel, Jennifer Paynter casts Mary, the middle Bennet sister, as the narrator. Though Pride and Prejudice has never been my favourite of Austen's works (Emma, is) I quite enjoyed this story that parallels the events of the original tale but creates it's own path from Longbourn Estate to colonial Australia.Mary Bennet is an unremarkable character in Pride and Prejudice, overshadowed by the beauty of Lizzie and Jane and the liveliness of Lydia and Kitty. Paynter has built upon the glimpses of her personality to develop a character with her own story to tell. It's unfortunate though that Mary is not a particularly likeable protagonist - she is pious, patronising and awkward. How much of her personality is informed by circumstance, and her own nature, is cause for debate however. As the middle girl, Mary is isolated from the close pairings of her older and younger sisters and the complexities of sibling relationships is a major theme of the novel. Mary also inexplicably bears the brunt of her father's disappointment in having no sons and without beauty to recommend her, she is beneath the notice of her mother whose sole concern is making advantageous matches for her daughters. So Mary retreats into herself, observing her family and their dramatics coolly, removing herself all together when she has the opportunity.Mary relates her own perspective of the relationships that form and dissolve around her between her sisters and their suitors including Mr Darcy, Mr Bingham and Mr Wickham. However she is much more concerned with her own interests, so while the events within Pride and Prejudice are regularly referenced, this story is more than a simple retelling. Mary's story extends beyond the scope of Austen's novel as Mary leaves Longbourne for some time to become a companion to her tutor's mother, and on her return Mary's friendship with Cassandra Long and her unusual relationship with Peter Bushell are her main preoccupations. We also follow Mary to Australia where her life patiently awaits her.Jennifer Paynter imitates the tone of Austen remarkably well, the language is true to the period and Mary's voice feels familiar. I have to admit I found the novel slow going at times, much in the same way as I did Pride & Prejudice, but I did find it a pleasant story and I think Austen fans will find Mary Bennet a satisfying read.