The Vocation Of Mary Bennet

It has been ten years since the wedding of Jane and Elizabeth Bennet, Mary has been left to care for her aging parents alone. Considered eccentric for her love of science and mathematics, she is forgotten by most of society... that is until a mysterious illness befalls the people of Meryton. Soon they and many others will know Mary's true worth. Jane Austen Sequel, Jane Austen Variation, Regency romance, Science Fiction

A unique and inspirational Pride and Prejudice sequel that will resonate with all readers who can relate to Mary Bennet's determination to live according to God's wishes Written by a Franciscan nun, this is a sympathetic tale of the middle Bennet sister from Pride and Prejudice. Pious Mary Bennet tries to do her duty in the world as she thinks God envisions it. Initially believing (mistakenly) that her sister Elizabeth married well only in order to provide for her sisters, Mary is happy to be relieved of the obligation to marry at all so that she can continue her faithful works. But she begins to have second thoughts after further studying marriage through her sisters' experiences as well as spending time with two young men. One is a splendid young buck whose determined courtship must have ulterior motives; the other is a kindly, serious young clergyman whose friendship Mary values more and more. One day she realizes that God very much made man and woman to be together...but which is the man for her?

Meet the Bennet's again... This book is a romance which revisits the Bennet Family a few years after Pride and Prejudice. In it, Mary Bennet, is the key to all the action, just as Elizabeth was key to the action of Pride and Prejudice. Mary, who is under the impression that Elizabeth was married well only in order to provide for her sisters, relaxes in the happy thought that she will never have to marry. Mrs. Bennet refuses to accept such a future for her, and works to change her mind. Meanwhile, her observation of her older sister Jane's happy situation, even with the unmarried sister (Carolyn Bingley) living with them, convinces Mary that she could just as well live out her life with Elizabeth and Darcy. Carolyn's later marriage to Darcy's cousin Colonel Fitzwilliam, and Jane's rather obvious relief, give her second thoughts. Her study of marriage through her sisters' experiences continues to change her mind, as does her new appreciation of her parents' marriage and that of her Aunt Gardiner. In the end, circumstances settle the whole puzzle for her, quite to her satisfaction.

Jane has a happy marriage and large family; Lizzy and Mr Darcy now have a formidable social reputation; Lydia has a reputation of quite another kind; Kitty is much in demand in London's parlors and ballrooms; but what of Mary? Mary is quietly celebrating her independence, having nursed her ailing mother for many years.

The first book to investigate Jane Austen's popular significance today, Everybody's Jane considers why Austen matters to amateur readers, how they make use of her novels, what they gain from visiting places associated with her, and why they create works of fiction and nonfiction inspired by her novels and life.The voices of everyday readers emerge from both published and unpublished sources, including interviews conducted with literary tourists and archival research into the founding of the Jane Austen Society of North America and the exceptional Austen collection of Alberta Hirshheimer Burke of Baltimore.Additional topics include new Austen portraits; portrayals of Austen, and of Austen fans, in film and fiction; and hybrid works that infuse Austen's writings with horror, erotica, or explicit Christianity.Everybody's Jane will appeal to all those who care about Austen and will change how we think about the importance of literature and reading today.

In this profoundly original and far-reaching study, Robert M. Polhemus shows how novels have helped to make erotic love a matter of faith in modern life. Erotic faith, Polhemus argues, is an emotional conviction—ultimately religious in nature—that meaning, value, hope, and even the possibility of transcendence can be found in love. Drawing on a wide range of disciplines, Polhemus shows the reciprocity of love as subject, the novel as form, and faith as motive in important works by Jane Austen, Walter Scott, the Brontës, Dickens, George Eliot, Trollope, Thomas Hardy, Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and Samuel Beckett. Throughout, Polhemus relates the novelists' representation of love to that of such artists as Botticelli, Vermeer, Claude Lorrain, Redon, and Klimt. Juxtaposing their paintings with nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts both reveals the ways in which novels develop and individualize common erotic and religious themes and illustrates how the novel has influenced our perception of all art.