Imaginary Friends
Real Simple magazine had an interesting topic for their book club in the May 2011 issue: what fictional character would you like to befriend?
I was never the type to imagine myself interacting with fictional characters, but there are some characters that I've felt were so ill-used that I longed to re-write them, or at least expand their characters. The main two are both from the same book: Mary Bennet and Lady Anne de Bourgh from Pride and Prejudice.
While I always felt I best understood the bookish, stand-offish Mr. Bennet, I identified most with Mary Bennet, the middle of the 5 Bennet sisters and the only homely girl in a family renowned for its beautiful daughters. She was also the most socially inept member of the family and put on a prim, scholarly persona in a desperate (and constantly failing) attempt to gain love, or at least approval.
Lady Anne is such a minor character in the story (daughter of Lady Catherine and cousin of Mr. Darcy) that all we ever read of her is that she says nothing and is thin, pale and sickly. Frankly, with a mother like Lady Catherine it's not surprising that Anne doesn't speak -- she'd be hard put to wedge a word in edgewise.
Ever since first reading Pride and Prejudice as a teenager, I've longed to flesh out these two characters whose only real function in the story is to serve as objects of derision for the other characters, on the rare occasions that they're noticed at all.
I'd make both characters far more self-aware than they're written. Mary I'd have using her persona deliberately to opt to the sidelines of a family she's a poor fit with. Hiding in books and making rote, cliched remarks on cue would be her way of keeping her mother and sisters from involving her in their endless bickering and drama -- the sort of thing her father can do just by going into his study and closing the door.
Anne, deprived of a decent Regency aristocrat's eduction by a controlling mother, I would give the lady-like hobby of embroidery, something not even her mother could claim was too taxing for Anne's limited strength. In company, Anne could work on silk fripperies while her mother droned and everyone ignored her, and in private she'd use her needle for more practical things made for the servants and local farm families -- the only friends she had since her mother also curtailed her social life.
My most ambitious imaginings have the two young women meeting and becoming fast friends. I imagine that during a long stay with her sister and brother-in-law, Mary would accompany them to Rosings Park for a visit with Darcy's aunt Catherine. The two side-lined characters are thrown into each others company and become so close that Mary is invited to remain indefinitely, as Anne's special friend and companion.
No one would object to this. It's clear that neither woman is likely to marry -- homely, poor Mary's only options are a Collins-like marriage of convenience, or being the old maid hanger-on of luckier relations; and Anne, who is apparently authentically sickly and not long for this world, is not fit for the sexual obligations or reproductive risks of marriage, whatever her delusional mother thinks.
With Anne the heiress of a vast, unentailed estate, neither Anne nor Mary would need to marry for financial security, esp. if Anne can manage to outlive her mother, thereby inheriting wealth from both parents and gaining control of Rosings Park. It's the closest thing to a traditional Austen happy ending two spinsters could hope for.