Inside the Making of ‘The Other Bennet Sister’ Finale and a Romantic Conclusion Worthy of Its Heroine

For the show's creator Sarah Quintrell, writing romance can be a struggle. But to give our beloved Bennet sister her own happy ending, the writer dug deep to craft something funny, true, and totally Mary.

[Editor’s note: The following interview contains some spoilers for “The Other Bennet Sister” Episode 10, now streaming on BritBox.]

Over the course of 10 delightful episodes, BritBox’s smash-hit series “The Other Bennet Sister” has charmed fans new and old, reoriented the feelings of even the most devout Jane Austen acolytes about certain classic characters, and even made bird-calling into a viable method of flirtation.

As in Janice Hadlow’s novel of the same name, which creator Sarah Quintrell adapted into a season of stellar television, the story of the once-maligned Mary Bennet (Ella Bruccoleri) tracks her journey to her own happiness, including two possible paramours. While romance is hardly the point of the series — it’s a coming-of-age dramedy, and Mary’s many evolutions and iterations are the prime focus here — getting our Bennet sister to a place where she can find, recognize, and accept love is a huge part of that process.

It doesn’t hurt that, as the series winds on, Mary finds herself the object of affection for both the steadfast Tom Hayward (Dónal Finn) and the more footloose-and-fancy-free William Ryder (Laurie Davidson). As the series hit its back half, the question of who would ultimately win Mary’s heart became less a query than about how? Think of it this way: If your main way of expressing devotion to each other comes through silly bird calls, there’s got to be some concern as to how a traditional proposal might play out.

To finally unite Mary and Tom, Quintrell took a pretty ambitious route, especially for someone who isn’t traditionally a fan of romance. “I find writing romance really hard, because my love language is sarcasm,” Quintrell told IndieWire. One proposal scene? That’s hard enough. But Quintrell wrote three. Well, kind of.

In Episode 8 (post-bird calling), Tom attempts to ask Mary to marry him during a calm boat excursion in the Lakes District. Enter: Mr. Ryder, who all but splash-lands on the boat, disrupting the shy twosome from the task at hand. In Episode 9, a more determined Tom tries again, as Mary, Ryder, Caroline Bingley, and the Gardiners hike up Scafell Pike. Once again, Ryder interrupts the pair and ultimately forces Tom to believe that Mary would be better off marrying Ryder, who has recently come into quite a fortune. At the end of the episode, he leaves. Never to be seen again? Not so fast.

“He has two near-proposals, one in the boat that is interrupted, and then on the mountain, which is also interrupted,” she said. “So not only did I have to kind of lock into that romance once, but three times. … I did write [the final episode] last, but I knew where I wanted to go. When I got to that Hayward scene, I knew that she wasn’t going to… She’s not a pushover. She’s not going to forgive him easily. She’s going to show her anger. She’s no longer going to try and smooth it over for him and make everything better.”

In the series’ finale, Episode 10, Mary has grown resigned to the fact that Tom is gone and she will never marry. But, crucially, she has still found her way and embraced her own hard-won happiness. In fact, when a distraught Tom Hayward suddenly reappears, a content Mary is strolling in a local park on her own. And, no, she doesn’t let him off the hook for his disappearance. But, yes, she does happily accept when a teary Tom finally expresses how he feels and asks her to marry him.

“That scene for me was as much about Mary’s growth as it was the love story,” Quintrell said. “I was thinking [as I wrote it], what he says to her, ‘I’ve spent my life feeling on the outside of things, but with you, I’m right in the middle of it all.’ [In writing it], I thought, well, how did I feel when I found my other half? What was different? I think it was that I always felt like everyone was having a better time and getting it more right than me. And when I met my husband, I suddenly felt like our life was the center of it all, and that that’s where the fun was, and that’s where the joy was. It’s intensely personal.”

Tom’s journey to happiness (and, chiefly, Mary) also held another personal element for Quintrell. “When they did that scene on the day, I didn’t just shed a tear, I ugly-cried,” she said. “The third AD was bear-hugging me. And when he says, ‘I’ve had to work for everything that I’ve had,’ well, that’s my story as well. It didn’t come easy. I didn’t come from this world. I’ve had to work so hard for it. I had to allow that out in feeling. So yeah, it was a joy to write, but I had to dig. I had to dig deep personally.”

Ultimately, Quintrell said, the series is about Mary and her own journey. Getting that part right was paramount. Everything else? It’s the cherry on top of Mary Bennet’s coming of age.

“I was like, ‘My feeling is that this is a story of self-love,'” Quintrell recalled. “That was always the first and foremost. And Hayward is a part of that jigsaw. He’s not the jigsaw, but he’s a big part of the jigsaw. [Producer] Jane [Tranter] said to me, ‘You need to walk the line of that, that this is a journey of self-love, but the romance has to feel important.'”

She added with a laugh, “And I was like, ‘OK, yeah, really easy! Thanks for that. Great. I’ll just sort that out this afternoon.’ I went away to think about it, and I thought the best thing I could do is just to be frank and honest with the audience. I felt like I, in writing Mary and in the snippets of her voiceover, I entered into that relationship with the audience, or allowed Mary to enter into that relationship.”

That’s why, after the proposal, Mary tells us in voiceover, “Yes, I married him.” She’s sharing with the audience what is important to her. It’s also why we don’t see the wedding itself. We see what happens after, as Mary and Tom embark on their married life together.

“The reason we don’t have a wedding scene is because that isn’t the point of this story,” Quintrell said. “The point is she chooses her own wallpaper, and she is pedantic when he gets the color wrong. And then, [we see that] she’s written her own advice for young women, because she doesn’t need anyone else’s. That’s the point of this story.”

All ten episodes of “The Other Bennet Sister” are now streaming on BritBox.