Mary Bennet - Finis

My mother always told me that if I couldn’t say something nice about someone to not say anything at all. Dorothy Parker quipped that if you can’t say something nice about someone, then sit next to her.

Old habits die hard and I’d rather love something than hate it, so maybe that’s why I’ve come up with a silver lining for The Independence of Mary Bennet. In the end, it made me laugh, though I doubt that was McCullough’s intention. Who knows what she intended to do with this novel, but it is such a silly, poorly written wreck of a book that I ended up shaking with laughter. As most reviewers have pointed out, McCullough crossed a line with this novel. I don’t mean the trashing of beloved Pride and Prejudice characters and their families. I mean she crossed the line at which she stopped taking her work seriously and started taking herself seriously, and the result is laughable and sad.

I read and enjoyed The First Man in Rome and The Grass Crown last year and was anticipating reading Caesar’s Women later this year. Now, I don’t know if I’ll bother. I know I won’t be reading her Antony and Cleopatra as it’s clear she’s lost her way as a writer. I don’t think McCullough was ever a great storyteller or writer, but she was a credible one. After finishing The Independence of Mary Bennet last night, I don’t consider her credible anymore.

I’m not sure why her editor, agent, publicist, or publisher didn’t have the guts to tell her that this story was not ready for prime time, but someone should have. Someone should have edited the clichés out. Someone should have tightened up the long internal dialogues and deleted the self questioning and insisted on McCullough showing rather than telling about a character’s evolution. There are so many things wrong with this novel that it will be required reading in writers workshops for years.

All this said, the most damning aspect of the novel is her utter disrespect for Austen. I don’t mean the trashing of her characters—I can live with that—but on pages 294-295, McCullough, who used her reputation as a bestselling author to get this egregious piece of writing published, has the gall to have her character Angus Sinclair tell Mary Bennet how foolish she was to plan on using the nine thousand pounds that Darcy had given her to publish a book. He goes on to say, “…But you must never pay to have a book published! If it’s worth reading, a publisher will be willing to incur the expense of publication himself. In effect, he takes a gamble on the author—that the book will attract enough readers to make a profit.”

As a respite from the dubious pleasure of reading this book, I started reading Rebecca Dickson’s A Jane Austen Treasury. In chapter one, Dickson shows the title page of the first edition of Sense and Sensibility, which clearly states that it was “Printed for the Author.” Austen paid to have this timeless novel printed. Mark Twain aside, there aren’t too many people who would say that Sense and Sensibility was not worth reading. The same cannot be said of The Independence of Mary Bennet.

Without McCullough’s name on it, this novel would never have seen the light of day. It shouldn’t have. Honestly, I would rather laugh at works that are intentionally funny, not those that are sadly so. It goes against the grain to say unkind things, at least out loud.

Sorry, Mom. I hope I haven’t set myself up for payback in the karma department, but I was asked to write a review and I did look for something nice to say. Really, I did.

Independent Mary Bennet - Day 2

Okay, so this book is getting sillier and sillier. If McCullough expects me to like Angus Sinclair then she shouldn't have him behave like a ninny and fall in love with someone, sight unseen, of the sister of a women he finds attractive. And, every time she talks about Mary's beauty, I choke. The only way that I could believe that Mary was other than plain and a crashing bore was to see her evolve. Apparently McCullough didn't believe Charlotte Bronte when she protested that a heroine doesn't have to be beautiful for a reader to care deeply about her story. And Mary may be now beautiful but she's still pedantic, preaching to us regarding how silly novels are (i.e., Fanny Burney and Mrs. Radcliffe).

When I last left Mary, she was making her way north to Manchester, via Pemberley, and was having an awful time dealing with the realities of traveling alone by stage. Get this, she was actually accosted by a highway man, knocked on the head, and has woken up in an underground prison of some sort. Paging Henry Tilney...if only he had been around and able to tell McCullough to "remember, that we are English."

Another gripe, Mary is off to learn about the poor of England, but having spent the past six months reading Gaskell I am struck by the self-righteousness of this. If McCullough wants to tell us about the plight of the poor of England, circa 1830, then she should tell some of the stories of the individuals as Gaskell did, not just go on about a relatively well-off woman needing to find a purpose to her life.

The writing is clumsy as well--at one point (the chapters aren't numbered, so I can't give you that, but the page is 85 of the hb edition), McCullough parenthetically tells us that a guinea "was worth slightly more than a pound, having twenty-one shillings to it rather than twenty." Interesting in itself but not germane to the story at all.

As you can tell, I'm not liking the book right now, but I shall forge ahead. Stay tuned.

The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet: A Novel

I started this Colleen McCullough novel this afternoon and, as expected, am feeling ambiguous about it.



On the one hand, McCullough is a good storyteller and I find I'm being sucked into the story wondering how everything is going to work out. On the other hand, this is fanfic and she's breaking the canon into little tiny bits without much respect for the Austen characters she's stealing.

First impressions? I wonder whether McCullough didn't write a Regency Romance and then decide to jump on the Austen bandwagon and changed all the names to those from P&P. I don't really wonder that, but I think most Janeites would like the story better if it were straight Regency Romance and not P&P fanfic--messing with Darcy and Lizzy is a dangerous game.

I do think the plot is promising, the characterization good (just not recognizable as the P&P characters I grew up with), and the level of detail okay. Granted, I just finished Voyager by Diana Gabaldon--I'm rereading the lot in anticipation of the final book in the series coming out this year--and McCullough is just not in the same league as Gabaldon when it comes to details.

It's telling that Mary is turning out to be another Elizabeth--in looks, in spirit, in attractiveness. She's a bit modern, though, to be really believable as a 37-year old woman in 1830. I've been reading lots of fiction about women in 1830-1850, and McCullogh's Mary is strictly a 20th century gal. Plus, it's hard to believe that Mary from P&P could blossom into Elizabeth after 17 years of nursing her mother while buried in a country estate with a big library just because her skin cleared up and she got some dental work done.

McCullough clearly appreciates the Lizzy of P&P since her story is that Mary is really Elizabeth having another chance to pick Mr. Right.

Back to being fair and giving this book a fighting chance...Charlie Darcy promises to be a gem of a character--the sensitive but all-man type--and his relationship to Aunt Mary is intriguing, at least at this point. We'll see what McCullough does with that. Having read half of her Rome series, this relationship could get pretty twisted pretty fast.