The woman has one abiding goal through the novel: to see all her daughters married and thus financially secure. Bennet shows to the sensibility and decorum most of her compatriots value so highly is not her weakness but in fact her greatest strength. The clever jokes her husband makes at her expense go right over her head, much to his amusement and her elder daughters’ disappointment. She tends to be read at face value-flighty, talkative, too often drunk, and too obsessed with marrying off each of her daughters. Bennet, mother to the five Bennet sisters and incorrigible social gadfly, is largely dismissed by both the book’s readers and its facetious narrator, but she is perhaps the most radical character in the novel. Of all the delightful idiots filling the pages of our well-worn copies of Pride and Prejudice (hint: this is everyone except maybe Charlotte), one of the best is also one of the most overlooked-even by Jane Austen, who never grants her a first name.
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