It is in chapter six of Pride and Prejudice that Mary Bennet first gets her chance to impress. Her sister Lizzie has been playing the piano; as soon as Lizzie finishes, her place is taken by Mary who, Jane Austen writes, "having, in consequence of being the only plain one in the family, worked hard for knowledge and accomplishments, was always impatient for display".

Yet Mary, she adds, "had neither genius nor taste; and though vanity had given her application, it had given her likewise a pedanticToo concerned with minor details or rules. air and conceitedToo vain or proud. manner".

Austen cast Mary as the least attractive member of the Bennet family. As author and critic Paula Byrne notes The New York Times, "Mary is vain, but flails in her efforts at self-improvement. She is judgmental of those around her whom we suspect she secretly envies. She desperately wants to say the smart thing, but can't think of it in time. She repeats opinions she's read as her own."

But in modern times people have been more sympathetic to Mary. There have been several novels which feature her as the main character and show the world of Pride and Prejudice through her eyes. And one, Janice Hadlow's The Other Bennet Sister, is to be made into a 10-part BBC drama.

This prompts Byrne to ask the question: "Could it be that we're obsessed with her because she is all of us?" Byrne suggests that, like Mary, we are always trying to make other people think well of us, but are tripped up by our own inadequacies. 

Byrne adds that we should perhaps see Mary as a realist. She knows that, having neither money nor good looks, her prospects as a woman in 19^th Century England are very limited: "Her clumsy efforts at self-improvement are, in their way, a courageous strike for independence."

In an interview¹ Janice Hadlow notes: "She isn't a character, I think, that Jane Austen particularly liked...She's very much an outsider in a large family; she has no allies, and we only ever see her through the rather jaundicedLiterally, to have the disease jaundice, but in this case it means displaying excessive bitterness, resentment or cynicism. perspective that Austen offers her."

Hadlow believes that everyone would love to be the heroine of Pride and Prejudice, Mary's clever, funny, sparky sister Lizzie. "But I think a lot of us also know what it's like to be Mary Bennet - awkward, always saying the wrong thing, uncertain about ourselves and our future."

Are we all Mary Bennet?

Yes: Lizzie is the self-confident character we aspire to be, but Mary is the one most like us. We all want to impress the rest of the world, but make mistakes and never come across as well as we hope to.

No: Plenty of people are awkward and anxious and there is nothing wrong with that. But Mary is also vain and conceited in a way that nice people try not to be, which is why Austen dislikes her.

Or... Life in the 19^th Century was so different - particularly for women - that it is pointless to make comparisons. Mary and Lizzie are too much the products of their time for us to identify with them.