“Pride and Prejudice” by Jane Austen will be entitled to a spin-off series on one of the Bennet sisters

TV SERIES – Bring out your empire waist dresses and white gloves. A new romantic production inspired by the work of Jane Austen is on track. The BBC announced this Wednesday, October 9 that it is currently developing a series based on the world of the novel Pride and Prejudice. It will focus on the third daughter of the Bennet clan, Mary. And good news for fans of period-style series, the project is already well advanced.

Titled The Other Bennet Sister (« The Other Bennet Sister »), the new BBC production is the adaptation of the eponymous novel by Janice Hadlow published in 2020. In Pride and PrejudiceMr and Mrs Bennet have five daughters: Jane, Elizabeth, Mary, Catherine “Kitty” and Lydia. Among her four sisters, Mary, shy and introverted, is more at ease with her piano and her books than at high society balls.

After the marriage of three of their daughters, the Bennet parents despair of seeing Mary one day receive a marriage proposal from a gentleman. Mrs Bennet does not hide her disappointment at the latter who is neither very pretty nor gifted with wit. Mary takes refuge in her books and her scores to escape the certainty that a marriage of convenience awaits her, or the life of an old single governess. Until the day she decides to leave Meryton to go to London and meet a person who will change her future.

According to our colleagues at Varietythe screenwriter of The Power Sarah Quintrell is in charge of writing the series. This will have ten episodes.

The BBC and Jane Austen

The British channel is not its first attempt at adapting historical romance novels and projects on the world of Jane Austen. As recalled by BBC on her website, it is a vein that she has been exploiting since the 1930s. The best-known project is undoubtedly the four-episode series Pride and Prejudice broadcast in 1995. Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle starred in the roles of Mr Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet. Certain scenes from this series have gone down in television and pop culture history, notably that of Colin Firth emerging from Pemberley Lake with his shirt soaked.

The novel published in 1813 has also been entitled to other adaptations, including a film released in 2005 with Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen) and spin-off. In particular the film Pemberleythe detective novel (adapted into series) Death comes to Pemberley or the parody series Pride and Misunderstandings. And Pride and Prejudice is Jane Austen’s most often adapted novel, it is not the only one. Other books by the English writer have also had this treatment: Reason and Feelings, Emma, Mansfield Park and more recently Sanditon to name just a few.

We still don’t know who will play Mary Bennet in The Other Bennet Sister, or when the series will be broadcast on the BBC. But a priori, we have plenty of time to learn to dance the “maggot” as in Pride and Prejudice.