“Mary had neither genius nor taste, and though vanity had given her application, it had given her a likewise pedantic air and conceited manner, which would have injured a higher degree of excellence than she had reached.” Poor Mary Bennet, “the only plain one in the family” (according to her own author Jane Austen) is largely ignored by her father, scorned by her mother, outshone by her four sisters and is offered only a dozen or so sentences in all 350 pages of Pride and Prejudice.