The Unexpected Marriage of Mary Bennet by Alison Leonard

Author: Alison Leonard. Review by Jeff Phelps

It is always fascinating to read fiction by a Quaker author. Even when there isn’t a single Quaker character in the novel, the sensibilities still shine through. Here, Alison Leonard chooses one of the more overlooked members of the Pride and Prejudice Bennet family to build her story around.

Mary Bennet is the middle of the five sisters, the only ‘plain’ one in the family, unmarriageable, short-sighted and untalented. This novel, however, gives Mary a full life, set in the realities of the time, with all its ignorance and challenges.

In this story Mary does get married, to the kindly but repressed Robert Needleman, whose close relationship with another vicar, who comes to stay ‘to discuss sermons’, is a central point of conflict. The author is never judgemental of this or any of the relationships. When, in a touching early scene, Needleman gives Mary a pair of spectacles, she sees clearly for the first time. One suspects this is not the only way the world becomes clearer to Mary.

Robert coaches his new wife in the doctrine of the ‘Great Chain of Being’, which, he claims, is ‘a truth which sets the pattern for our lives’. Humanity represents ‘the summit of God’s creation’ with every small fragment of life graded below in hierarchy. Mary obediently tries to accept her husband’s teaching but soon comes to a more mature view.

Mary is sometimes sensual yet beguilingly innocent about the ways of the body – both her own and others’ – but is enlightened when she comes across the reverend gentlemen in flagrante, and, when, strikingly, she witnesses a birth and a death by the roadside. Instead of being set back by these revelations Mary uses them to find her own strength and direction. This is surely a Quaker insight: to build on who we are with all our difficulties and disappointments rather than allow them to overwhelm us. For any woman in the early nineteenth century this must have been a real achievement – another of Alison Leonard’s points.

The relationships between the moneyed characters and the servants really set the book apart. As Leonard explains in her acknowledgements: ‘Mrs Hill is the only servant actually named in Pride and Prejudice’. She counteracts this by not only including Mrs Hill as a long-suffering companion to the family, but by giving the servants inner lives as complex as any of the ‘upstairs’ characters. The servants are moved between households like so many pieces of furniture, yet they have much more than walk-on parts. Even the surly housekeeper, Mrs Beattie, perhaps the nearest character to a ‘baddie’, is treated with sympathy. Part of Mary’s awakening comes in her physical tenderness towards the servant sisters, Milly and Esther, and in her overpowering longing to care for Esther’s illegitimate child.

Perhaps the main takeaway from this remarkable novel is to remind us that the lives of servants and workers are not separate from those who employ them. The two worlds are interdependent. There is ‘that of God’ in all of them. Plus The Unexpected Marriage of Mary Bennet is a great read.

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