BritBox Gets 'The Other Bennet Sister' for Austen Anniversary

I would start this post with the classic "It is a truth universally acknowledged," except we're about five years out from being able to say anything about streaming being universally acknowledged. Instead, let us merely say the news that BritBox is boarding the BBC's Jane Austen 250th birthday commission, The Other Bennet Sister, is deeply unsurprising. PBS and Masterpiece had already gone their own way with Miss Austen, and Netflix is in the midst of remaking the Pride & Prejudice miniseries. Of the streamers that cater to Anglophiles and need to deliver something in honor of Jane Austen's semiquincentennial, BritBox was the obvious player to bid for the BBC's series.

Like Miss Austen, which wraps up on PBS in mid-May 2025, The Other Bennet Sister is a recent novel that takes a new angle on Jane Austen's life and works. Both books arrived in 2020, and were instant best sellers and their respective authors' first major hit. (Gill Hornby, who wrote Miss Austen, had published two books prior to its publication; The Other Bennet Sister was author Janice Hadlow's debut novel.)

However, Miss Austen follows a real-life mystery that explores the Austen sisters who outlived their famous sibling, while The Other Bennet Sister stays firmly within Austen's fictional world, focusing on Elizabeth's least-likeable sibling, bookish, sanctimonious prig Mary Bennet, who many believe was based on Jane's sister (well, sister in-law), Mary Austen.