Great marketing sense or mawkish sensibility? Take your pick: Orion has just announced a sequel to Pride and Prejudice, to be published next summer to coincide with the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen’s death. Perception by Terri Fleming will be set a few years after the events set forth in the original novel and follows Mary and Kitty, the two sisters left unmarried by Austen. That book will be followed, in 2018, by The Other Bennet Girl by Janice Hadlow, which similarly promises to show a hidden side to Mary.

Austen re-imaginings are nothing new: in the last couple of years alone we’ve had Jo Baker’s Longbourn and the execrable Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, not to mention Bridget Jones’s Diary and Death Comes to Pemberley. Now it seems There’s Something About Mary, to cite another spinoff by Sebastian Di Mattia. How many books are there already out there about Mary Bennet? I must admit I stopped counting. The Forgotten Sister, The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet, Becoming Mary, Mary Bennet’s Chance, The Pursuit of Mary Bennet (subtitled “A Pride and Prejudice Novel”, which slightly wrongfooted me: isn’t Pride and Prejudice already a novel, not a franchise?) … Mary Bennett and the Bloomsbury Coven promises much excitement but anyone expecting a time-travelling sorcery mashup with Virginia Woolf and company will be disappointed.



To recap, in case you now know more about the Mary Bennet industry than the character herself, Mary is the plain, bookish, subdued sister to Elizabeth, Jane, Lydia and Kitty. Here’s Austen pulling no punches on her pianoforte skills:



Mary had neither genius nor taste; and though vanity had given her application, it had given her likewise a pedantic air and conceited manner, which would have injured a higher degree of excellence than she had reached.

Austen does not even grant her the intelligence or ambition that redeems the novel’s other unprepossessing spinster, Charlotte Lucas. Mary’s high (or low, depending on your point of view) moment comes at the Netherfield ball, when she takes centre stage and embarrasses the family by playing and singing appallingly badly. Mary is, then, very much the “forgotten” sister, while everyone else goes off and gets married.



Mary's silent and futile presence is to me the best testament possible to the ranks of unremarkable women she stands for

This won’t, I promise, become a rant about derivative spin-offs. Re-imagining classic novels from the point of view of minor characters can produce fascinating new insights: Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, JM Coetzee’s Foe, Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, Sena Jeter Naslund’s Ahab’s Wife and Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead are just a few that spring to mind. They reflect a broader cultural revisionist tendency, which seems to be accelerating, to re-inscribe the voices of the marginalised, reassert the value of “minor” figures. It’s no coincidence that, excepting Stoppard’s play, these stories are all retold from the perspective of women.

Rebecca Hall as Antoinette Cosway in an adaptation of Wide Sargasso Sea, the story of the arranged marriage between Cosway and Mr Rochester from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Photograph: BBC/Kudos Film and Television/Kudos Film and Television

But this interest in fleshing out the stories of minor characters – thinking about “what happens next” as though they are real people unfairly sidelined – raises an interesting point about the processes of characterisation. How do novels make us accept the differences between major and minor characters? How do authors make their heroes and heroines complex and credible while relying on a cast of supporting characters who lack interiority? It’s an asymmetry on which the realist novel, in particular, relies – what Alex Woloch calls the conundrum of “The One v the Many”.



The singularity of Elizabeth Bennett, after all – the reason she so often features in lists of our favourite literary characters – relies solely upon the relief cast by her dull sisters. Lizzie only has space in the book for a remarkable interior life because her sisters do not. Even beautiful Jane is a bit insipid – a fact Austen knowingly plays with, as her eventual engagement to Bingley is briefly threatened by Jane’s reticence.



We instinctively think of characterisation in terms of whether characters are believable, vividly imagined, likable or not. So I can understand why there’s such a slew of books seeking to reconstruct the innermost emotions, hopes and aspirations of outwardly unremarkable characters whose function just seems to be to act as props in the story of somebody else. It reminds me of a moment in Middlemarch, the English novel most concerned with such imaginative sympathy:



One morning, some weeks after her arrival at Lowick, Dorothea – but why always Dorothea? Was her point of view the only possible one with regard to this marriage? I protest against all our interest, all our effort at understanding being given to the young skins that look blooming in spite of trouble; for these too will get faded, and will know the older and more eating griefs which we are helping to neglect. […] Mr Casaubon had an intense consciousness within him, and was spiritually a-hungered like the rest of us.

Dorothea’s misery in her marriage is convincing because we only see one side of it, Eliot chides us (and before you ask: no, Casaubon has not spawned a franchise of sequels). Austen isn’t Eliot, though – if she were, we might find out why Mr Collins is as paradoxically pompous and servile as he is, instead of just accepting it and chortling along. Austen does flatten and simplify many of her minor characters, because she’s ultimately most interested in her heroine. She even wrote a whole book about that kind of solipsism in Emma.



But that’s not Austen’s broader point – her minor characters (Miss Bates, Mrs Elton, Lady Catherine de Bourgh and her anaemic daughter Anne) are equally as memorable to me as her protagonists precisely because of the distortions they undergo. They transcend their significance as individuals. The poignancy of Mary’s situation, for example, resides precisely in her effacement: neglected by her parents and unmarriageable, her silent and futile presence haunting the shadows of Pride and Prejudice is to me the best testament possible to the ranks of unremarkable women she stands for. With characters like Mary, Austen’s realism looks outwards, to subtly observe and comment on her social world, while those such as Lizzie provide a vehicle for her extraordinarily sensitive explorations of individual consciousness. It’s Austen’s uncanny ability to sustain the two perspectives that makes her one of the greatest realist novelists, and I can’t help but feel that dimension of her writing will be lost as unremarkable Mary is made, after all this time, remarkable.

