In Pride and Prejudice Lizzie Bennet is playing the piano. As soon as she finishes, her place is eagerly taken by her sister Mary, who plays badly.

According to Jane Austen, because Mary is not good-looking, she tries hard at things like playing the piano.

As novelist and critic Paula Byrne notes in The New York Times: "Mary is vain, but flailsWaving ones arms around wildly. in her efforts at self-improvement... 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 kinder to Mary. There have been several novels which feature her as the main character and show the world through her eyes. 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 shortcomings.

Byrne adds that we should perhaps see Mary as a realist. She knows that, without money or 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 conceitedToo vain or proud. 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.