Jane Austen's Persuasion: a dramatic audiobook
ColourfulMel_VA for Mary Elliot Musgrove
HOW TO PLAY MARY
Mary is a drama queen, snitchy, gossiping, and demanding. She's from a high-born family and has become spoilt because of it. It makes her sometimes argumentative. An important note on culture here is that Mary would never yell. If she's angry or disagreeing with someone she would then speak to them slowly and clearly as though they are an idiot and not understanding what she's saying because she is obviously right.
ABOUT THE CHARACTER
The youngest Elliot sister, Mary is married to Charles Musgrove and has two small boys. She is high-strung, often hysterical, and always aware of the imagined slights others have done to her. A rather inattentive mother, Mary focuses on social climbing instead of her children. She is married to a man who originally proposed to Anne. Her worst fear is a social snub or being connected to people of low birth. Mary's a major character and an essential contrast to Anne's stable, calm, sensible manner. She is often used by Austen to be a physical representation of Anne's life which makes the reader feel Anne's discomfort for being around her family.
Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch Hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage; there he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one; there his faculties were roused into admiration and respect, by contemplating the limited remnant of the earliest patents; there any unwelcome sensations, arising from domestic affairs changed naturally into pity and contempt as he turned over the almost endless creations of the last century; and there, if every other leaf were powerless, he could read his own history with an interest which never failed. This was the page at which the favourite volume always opened: ELLIOT OF KELLYNCH HALL.
[Mary's child has had a bad fall and dislocated his shoulder. Mary doesn't want to be nursing him, she wants to be up at the great house meeting Captain Frederick Wentworth and she voices her resentment to Anne.]
So you and I are to be left to shift by ourselves, with this poor sick child; and not a creature coming near us all the evening! I knew how it would be. This is always my luck.[Mary is eager for her young sister-in-law to catch the eye of Captain Frederick Wentworth, which would give her the advantage of losing a possible engagement to a man called Charles Hayter. She thinks marriage to Charles Hayter would be a disgraceful connection (hardly, she's just a snob) and verbally professes her wish to distance to Captain Wentworth.]
It is very unpleasant, having such connexions! But, I assure you, I have never been in the house above twice in my life.
