The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet

by Colleen McCullough

Book Overview

The bestselling author of "The Thorn Birds" breathes new life into the characters of Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice." Jane and Elizabeth's younger, bookish sister, Mary is still too willful to be confined within traditional marriage, so she embarks on an adventure of her own.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1416596488
• ISBN13: 9781416596486
• Release Date: December 2008
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Length: 337 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.3" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

A wonderful Book!

I really enjoyed this book. I read to be entertained and this book was very enjoyable. It was uniformly interesting with likeable characters. An energetic journey through another time.

Great story

I don't know why this book has gotten so many bad reviews. I loved it. You know, I've read all of the fairytale stories of Darcy and Elizabeth and all I have to say is that after a while, it gets boring. This was anything but. Lighten up people. Real life happens and this is more realistic than a lot I've read lately.

A successor to Persuasion and Sense and Sensibility, not P & P

I am not surprised that the Lizzie-Darcy 'shippers are up in arms about this book, and I'm also not surprised that devotees of Pride and Prejudice are astonished by this book. Pride and Prejudice is absolutely a romance, and this book is not. As a literary scholar and historian, I found it far more interesting than sweet and that's good. Too many P & P sequels are all about the perfection of the Darcy marriage and do their best to be Fitzwilliam Darcy's hagiography, without revealing or even recognizing that the man is deeply flawed. This book does not and for that, it's worth 3 stars alone. I had just finished a re-"reading" of P & P (on audiobook, while driving, housecleaning, exercise) before I started this and was reading a social history of the period for a paper I'm writing. This book takes place in 1812-1814 (probably) thanks to nods about the war with America and some discussion of practicalities of the period. They're things that Miss Austen could never write about for publication, though her letters show she was aware of the world as it was changing around her. When observed as a contextual, realistic view of the Regency, The Independence is a strongly social novel. It's written from a perspective much closer to Anne Eliot's, of Persuasion -- of an intelligent woman, restricted by her time and the economic circumstances of a world where women had little influence. It's also strongly economic in scope, as Sense and Sensibility is not a romance, but a story about money. The Independence has a strong resemblance to both of those. The language is excellent -- and the fact that obscenities are used to stiletto effect as would be appropriate for the character who utters them given the circumstances -- gives this a much more realistic, fully realized world view than Miss Austen could have written about. Her circumstances were just too circumscribed and publications of her day were too expurgated to have allowed strict realism. However, anyone who has read Miss Austen's surviving letters would see that she herself pushed limits of what could be said, and had she had the freedom to write as fully about her world as The Independence does, she might have done so. Further, this isn't a book about teenaged, sheltered young ladies, which Pride and Prejudice was. The women in this book are twenty years older and wiser. Even as naive as Mary is initially, she has grown up. So has Elizabeth, but only recently. The Darcy marriage is fascinating and before I started this book, I had just finished P & P again, and doing so on audio forced me to really hear the relationship between the 21 year old Elizabeth and the 30 year old Darcy. They didn't know each other when they married -- they had an idea of each other's characters, but were primarily acting out of attraction. Twenty years on, given their personalities, social obligations, and the lack of divorce in their time, such a marriage was going to cause problems, though not necessarily the ones I enco

An enjoyable send-up of Austin

I am a junkie of 19th century fiction, including Jane Austin. McCullough is one of the few current fiction writers I read avidly. While I think her series on the fall of the Roman Republic is by far her best work, I have enjoyed nearly all her other books because in every book she experiments with novel ideas and forms always with interesting results. And experimentation is certainly at work in the Independence of Miss Mary Bennet. Since other reviewers have described the plot in detail, I'll stick with my reaction to the book. It was obvious from the first chapters that the book is a send-up of Austin and 19th century fiction more generally and I settled in to enjoy the book in that light rather than expecting the book to read like something Austin would have written. The plot is screwball and while reading the book I thought of Mary's adventures as "the perils of Pauline"--a phrase used by another reviewer. The references to bodily functions that offended some other reviewers are part of the satire since 19th century writers did not acknowledge that there were such things. Babies just happened, food and drink went in and never came out and so on. If you are an Austin (or 19th century fiction) devotee without a sense of humor, don't read this book. You will hate it as did some reviewers. If you can enjoy seeing 19th century conventions satirized, by all means get the book.

A very different look at Austen, twenty years on.

Like a pathetic junkie, I keep returning to all things Austen on a regular basis, looking for yet another fix. Most of the time, when I dip into something that claims to be a sequel to one of the classic six novels, or some sort of fiction derived from Jane Austen or about her, I am sorely disappointed. Either they are full of billing and cooing between couples, or an author trying to be clever, or just so full of twaddle that the book is quickly consigned to the 'dispose of' heap and I'm left cursing at the waste of time and money. But every now and then I get a glimmer of hope. And it happened this time that I was in for a surprise. This time, author Colleen McCullough takes a look at Jane Austen, and oh, is the reader in for quite a few surprises. For one, it is more than twenty years after the events chronicled in Pride and Prejudice. Both Jane and Elizabeth have married the men they love, and have settled into raising numerous broods of children and running their husbands' estates. Kitty has made a brilliant marriage to a peer, and now is happily being a wealthy Society widow in London. As to Lydia, the less said the better... And Mary? The bookish, rather sanctimonious middle daughter who was termed by her father as one of the three silliest girls in Britain? She has spent the years caring for her mother in her long widowhood, ensconced in a comfortable manor by the thoughtful Mr. Darcy, and reading everything she can lay her hands on. In short, Mary has been educating herself, seeking to learn everything that she can about everything. But as we see in the opening pages of the novel, Mrs. Bennet falls asleep one afternoon and doesn't wake up, creating changes in Mary's life. The first of them comes when Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy informs her that he has sold the home that she has lived in for the last twenty years, and that she would be welcome to come to either Pemberley or with Jane's family. And he is shocked when Mary refuses, having no intention of becoming a keeper of her nieces and nephews. Nor does she intend to vanish into obscurity somewhere. She intends to see the world, and bring about change, spurred on by her reading of the Westminister Chronicle and the writings of the unknown Argus. Most of all, she refuses to have Mr. Darcy run her life, seeing something else beneath that polished exterior of haughtiness and wealth... For it seems that nothing has turned out quite right in the decades following the happy marriages at the end of Pride and Prejudice. I won't reveal exactly what those are, leaving the reader to discover them what they are. Let's just say that it does have a logical progression and yes, it does make sense. But as they say, no good deed goes unpunished, and Mr. Darcy is in for quite a few surprises of his own, especially when Lydia turns up at Pemberley with a big bone to pick with Darcy over something in the past. It is one of the many times in this book when I was roaring with laughter. On the darker side o