Mrs. Bennet Has Her Say
1785. How did Mrs. Bennet, made famous in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, become the “woman of mean understanding, little information and uncertain temper” who has driven readers, as well as the entire Bennet clan, absolutely mad for the past two hundred years? Jane Juska’s debut novel gives us the hilarious, and heretofore untold, history of the lady.
Done as a series of letters between Mrs. Bennet – here named Marianne, though Austen gives her none – and her sister Jane, and interspersed with diary entries of Mr. Bennet, the story starts on Marianne’s unfortunate wedding night. While she spends the balance of the novel attempting to avoid Mr. Bennet’s advances, as she has given her heart – and her virginity – to one Colonel Millar, Mr. Bennet is trying with equal vigor to disabuse her of those notions.
I found Marianne more to be pitied than censured. She is a woman of her time. Un(der)educated and married very young, she focuses on the frivolities of life: clothes, parties, and the latest gossip. Funny and filled with pathos (the passages about the Bennets’ stillborn son will bring a reader to tears), this is a terrific first novel.
