A Monstrous Meet Cute: Mary Bennett and Victor Frankenstein Pair Off in Pride and Prometheus

The  10 years between when the events of Pride and Prejudice close and those of Frankenstein begin are something like half a lifetime—time enough for the most priggish, socially awkward Bennett sister to have grown and changed. In Kessel’s mashup, it’s an older, more chagrined Mary Bennett who meets a half-recalcitrant Victor Frankenstein, at some point during the interregnum in Shelley’s novel when Victor goes to England to build his creature a wife.
Mary was the awkward, pious sister in Pride and Prejudice. Her two big scenes involve being rather harshly shut down by her father after she’s monopolized the pianoforte during a ball, and then humble-harshing her sister Lydia after the latter elopes with a rakehell. Suffice it to say, Mary doesn’t come off so great in Austen’s book: judgmental and showboating, outwardly righteous but ultimately self-absorbed. (Though I don’t think I’m the only one who spite-ships Mary and the Bennetts’ odious cousin, Mr. Collins; it seems like they deserve each other.)

Neither does Victor seem like such a great guy in Frankenstein, despite the narrator’s big crush on him. Victor creates a being, abandons him, promises the creature (who is literate, well-spoken, and eminently rational) a companion, reneges on this promise, and then swans around Europe like none of it happened. I find the Victor Frankenstein of Shelley’s novel nothing less than infuriating.
We first meet Mary Bennett in Pride and Prometheus on the beach in Lyme Regis, fossil hunting with a potential suitor who fancies himself an archeologist. She’s half-friends with Mary Anning, the historical figure credited with finding the some of the first dinosaur fossils in Great Britain. (Anning, being the daughter of a cabinetmaker, and a woman, was never given much credit in her lifetime.) When Mary meets her, she’s hawking fossils on the street. Mary’s interest in archaeology is treated more like a spinster’s eccentric pastime—she being the daughter of gentry—but she’s still knocked for it. Mary’s almost-suitor mansplains both fossils and the propriety of talking to Anning. Despite his condescension, Miss Bennett considers him a viable candidate for husband, as he doesn’t quash her interests completely. Mary Bennett’s future prospects for love and happiness are not the best. (Come to that, neither are Kitty Bennett’s, the other unmarried Bennett sister leftover from Pride and Prejudice, whom we meet again in this novel.)

Victor, meanwhile, is mooning about England after the death of his brother by the Creature’s hands, and the execution of his family’s ward, Justine, for the crime. The plot of Pride and Prometheus follows the events of Frankenstein with fidelity, which introduces some problems and mitigates others. Both Victor and his Creature are wrapped in the agonies of the halfway point of Frankenstein, and their character development and characterization can only diverge so far from the text. Mary and Kitty, however, have had a decade in which to grow and change, disappoint and become bitter, reassess and move on. Mary and Kitty, despite their seeming entrapment with the mores of the time, are the prime emotional actors in Pride and Prometheus, though unfortunately, ultimately, nothing they can do will change the outcome.

The book is something of a love triangle, with the love removed and replaced with something more fraught. Mary is smitten with Victor when she meets him. His respect of her interest in science, and their communion on the subject, stands in rough counterpoint with Mary’s armchair archaeologist suitor, who treats her friends and her intelligence like an adorable nothing. But Mary ends up in the unenviable middle between Victor and his Creature, privy to their separate but related desires and horrors, yet unable to affect either in a meaningful way. Victor and the Creature are bound for the ice. Mary and Kitty will have lives less cold, but maybe just as spare, lived in moments on a beach where they dig up the bones of creatures from the deep, the fossils of the leviathan, a past of hot emotions run cold and still.
I don’t mean to make this novel sound like a tragic bummer, but there is an inevitability at work. That said, Kessel (The Moon and the Other) gives space to the lighthearted skewering one can find in Austen, complete with Easter eggs referencing her other works. Early on, the Bennetts discuss an accident that happens in Lyme, where a girl foolishly jumped off a wall and knocked herself out—undoubtedly an event from Persuasion, another Austen novel about a spinster and her regrets. Though Kessel’s tone is decidedly more somber, it nevertheless captures the domesticity, interiority, and moral considerations of Austen, while maintaining the almost overheated action of Shelley’s Gothic.
Pride and Prometheus is available now.