The Other Elliot Sister faces the same trap as The Other Bennet Sister

The BBC has announced that The Other Elliot Sister will start production in 2027, following the success of Bad Wolf’s reimagining of Pride and Prejudice, The Other Bennet Sister.

Scripted by Sarah Quintrell and based on a novel being written concurrently by Janice Hadlow, the series promises to shine a light on “an intriguing figure at the edges of Persuasion,” according to Bad Wolf CEO Jane Tranter.

The early concept of The Other Elliot Sister requires us to believe that Elizabeth Elliot exists at the periphery of Jane Austen’s novel. This, despite the fact Elizabeth is the de facto head of the family and a persistent antagonist to Anne, when she’s at Kellynch Hall.

But then, the same suspension of disbelief was required to believe that Mary Bennet (Ella Bruccoleri) was maligned and forgotten despite being part of within the oeuvre of one of the English language’s most prominent and enduring authors, and a persistent subject of re-imaginings. Though, she was certainly more anonymous than Elizabeth Elliot despite being part of the oeuvre of one of the English language’s most prominent and enduring authors, and a persistent subject of re-imaginings. Though, she was certainly more anonymous than Elizabeth Elliot.

Whatever the artistic justification, the corporate motivation is clear: The Other Bennet Sister was a hit and generated, according to the BBC, 250 million views across its social media accounts. It’s an algorithmic success that guarantees a follow-up would be greenlit in record time.

It might seem strange to critique a television show that doesn’t yet exist, based on a book still being written. But Austen fans who watched The Other Bennet Sister flatten the characters of Pride and Prejudice to make Mary more sympathetic have greeted the news of a follow-up with a dose of dread.

There are enough similarities between the two to make comparison both easy and unflattering. Persuasion is, after all, a dark mirror to Pride and Prejudice – one that often defies adaptation in ways Pride and Prejudice never has.

Sir Walter Elliot is a pathologically vain subversion of Mr Bennet’s passive, ostensibly jovial, manner, and Elizabeth is a cold enabler in direct opposition to the adored Jane Bennet. If Mary was, as The Other Bennet Sister alleges, the misunderstood underdog, the “other” sister in Persuasion is, arguably, its protagonist Anne: loved but unvalued, in grief for a lost mother and a love she was persuaded to leave behind.

Austen is no stranger to complex familial relationships, and in Persuasion, the Elliot family may be her sharpest portrait of more modern domestic intricacies may be her sharpest portrait of a family ruled by vanity and self-interest; Sir Walter’s vanity drives his family to ruin while he builds Elizabeth in his own self-interested image. Anne, by contrast, is the classic scapegoat whom the family – Elizabeth included – view as being at odds with their status-obsessed world. Mary, meanwhile, becomes the invisible child: quickly married off to escape the household.

Elizabeth isn’t an immediately obvious victim in this toxic system, so much as an enforcement mechanism – something that has made her unliked, but certainly not forgotten, by Austen fans.

Therefore, turning her into a sympathetic protagonist will require a deft and sensitive hand – one that was notably lacking from The Other Bennet Sister as it stripped the Bennets of all nuance; choosing, instead, to victimise Mary and vilify the women around her. It is difficult to imagine the same team being able to tackle the darker, more urgent, dynamics of the Elliots.

That’s not to say Elizabeth is incompatible with becoming sympathetic. She is a woman who, following the death of Lady Elliot, was thrust into surrogate parenthood of her sisters at 16 by an unstable father. The cold obsession with class she developed in the intervening years is not the random toxicity with which some brand her, but a defence mechanism; a survival instinct. That should make for a fascinating baseline from which to explore – though should not, as The Other Bennet Sister did with Mary, condone – Elizabeth’s behaviour.

It remains to be seen how The Other Elliot Sister approaches this, but The Other Bennet Sister is instructive here, too. It redefined Mrs Bennet (Ruth Jones) from a practical woman, concerned with her daughters’ future if they are not married off, while their beauty makes that simple to a cartoonishly abusive villain. Similarly, it framed Mr Bennet’s (Richard E Grant) passive, selfish disinterest in Mary as a tragic inability to express his admiration due to his wife’s tyranny.

One is wary of how the decision-making that led to those changes might be applied to the more complex relationships between the Elliot sisters. On current evidence, it feels more likely that the focus may fall on softening Sir Walter and vilifying Anne, given how persistently The Other Bennet Sister frames women as high-school mean girls deserving of ire and men as browbeaten objects of Mary’s sympathy. Not least as Elizabeth and Mary share certain similarities – shorn of a mother figure and gravitating to a remaining parental figure – that would make rehashing the themes of the first series in the second too easy.

An approach that would leave Persuasion, and Elizabeth, shorn of Austen’s most urgent throughline. It is, after all, her most economically anxious novel. Are we about to see a timely, resonant story that redefines Elizabeth as the practical figure of a crumbling family during one of the worst cost-of-living crises in memory? The same opportunity for grounding social commentary was ignored in The Other Bennet Sister. It’s difficult to imagine the subtext of Elizabeth being driven to her obsession with status by financial panic taking front-and-centre when Hadlow and Quintrell rejected the same overt nuance in Mrs Bennet.

Want to see this content?

This page contains content provided by Google reCAPTCHA. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as Google reCAPTCHA may use cookies and other technologies. To view this content, choose 'Accept and continue' to allow Google reCAPTCHA and its required purposes.

All of this is slightly unfair, of course: we’re looking at The Other Elliot Sister from such a distance. Elizabeth, and Austen, have remarkable potential for reimagining. PD James turned the aftermath of Pride and Prejudice into a murder mystery, and while my dream of Austen in Space seems unlikely, there’s plenty of room to play around in the margins of her work.

On a more grounded level, Elizabeth could make a surprisingly comic protagonist who cannot understand Anne even though we, the audience, do. Alternatively, there’s a moving story to be told of her finding catharsis following the death of her father. Those are only two of many obvious directions that might preserve Austen’s spirit.

I am willing to be surprised as more news emerges about The Other Elliot Sister. But, having missed so many opportunities to make Mary compelling in The Other Bennet Sister, I, and many other fans, can’t be blamed for worrying a follow-up may court the same mistakes.

The Other Elliot Sister will air on BBC iPlayer and BBC One.

Add The Other Elliot Sister to your watchlist on the Radio Times: What to Watch app – download now for daily TV recommendations, features and more.

Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more TV recommendations and reviews listen to The Radio Times Podcast.