Centuries after she published Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen continues to influence pop culture and inspire spinoffs. Clueless, Bridget Jones's Diary, Karen Joy Fowler's The Jane Austen Book Club, novels from Jennifer Weiner and so many others pay homage in ways overt and subtle to the queen of smart British novels. And every new season brings more new Austen adaptations. These two are extra special—one for Janeite traditionalists, the other for readers looking for something totally different.

★ The Other Bennet Sister

Janice Hadlow's absolutely magical The Other Bennet Sister invites us into the world of one of the less celebrated sisters from Pride and Prejudice, Mary. The middle child, Mary is plain, bookish and completely outshone by her beautiful older sisters, Jane and Lizzy, and her lively younger sisters, Lydia and Kitty. One by one, the other Bennet sisters are married and settled. Yet Mary struggles to find her place in a world oriented around the belief that marriage—not knowledge—is the only path to happiness for women.

The sisters are "all read well enough and knew enough history and geography not to look absolutely foolish in company. Anything more was not only unnecessary, but probably unwise." Education is not included in Mrs. Bennet's list of wifely qualities, and she has "no desire to add to her daughters' disadvantages by burdening them with a reputation for cleverness."

Mrs. Bennet is borderline abusive to her least charming daughter, and Mary withers in a family that neither supports her thirst for knowledge nor shows her any affection. After her father's death turns the family estate over to a male cousin, Mary finds herself without a secure home or future. She lands with her aunt and uncle in London where, in the bustling city, she takes the first tentative steps toward choosing her own life trajectory.

Hadlow is a former journalist, having run two of the BBC's major television channels. It is a marvel that The Other Bennet Sister is her first novel. Her writing is elegant and wry, the story wise and engrossing. I had to keep reminding myself I wasn't actually reading Austen.

Sansei and Sensibility

Karen Tei Yamashita's story collection, Sansei and Sensibility, is an equally compelling—if slightly less literal—ode to Austen. A National Book Award finalist for I Hotel, Yamashita is a clever and spare writer. In many of her touching, surreal short stories, she uses Austen as a springboard into tales featuring Japanese Americans in California. (Sansei is a term that means people of Japanese descent born and raised in the Americas.)

"Emi" is a hilarious take on the matchmaking-gone-wrong premise of Emma. In "Giri & Garman," we see the dashing Fitzwilliam Darcy from Pride and Prejudice reincarnated as Darcy Kabuto II, "captain of the football team, class vice president, and voted best looking, which meant he looked like he was the son of Toshiro Mifune." (Mifune was a dashing Japanese movie star who appeared in Seven Samurai and Yojimbo.)

But the most powerful entry is "KonMarimasu," Yamashita's meditation on the phenomenon of Japanese tidying guru Marie Kondo and how it relates to Japanese Americans' experiences in World War II internment camps, where families' few possessions were treasured and, later, passed down. Yamashita writes, "Kondo might say that this stuff in your family archive and this stuff in all these internment museums were parted with to launch them on a new journey. You cogitate the joy spark thing, and you think about simple furniture made from wood scraps, the pink crocheted dress, the sen nin bari, the green high school sweater, the jug of sake, and the waffle iron you know your family smuggled into camp."

Yamashita's writing echoes the pain and strength of the Japanese American experience. A potent mashup of Austen and Japanese American culture, Sansei and Sensibility is both entertaining and profound.

DEBUT The "other Bennet sister" in this delightful semi-sequel to Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice is Mary, the plain middle sister between the beautiful Jane and Lizzy and the pretty, flighty, and irresponsible Kitty and Lydia. But instead of the moralizing and slightly censorious spinster of the original, this Mary is shy and withdrawn, deeply wounded by her mother's constant comparisons between her and her sparkling sisters. Instead of turning into a prig, Mary takes her life into her own hands as is possible for her time and finds her own way to love and happiness. This is a charming and enchanting story featuring one of the overlooked characters of a beloved classic. While the cast feels very much as remembered from the original, Mary comes into her own after being browbeaten by her overbearing mother at every turn. In adulthood she manages to find the inner fortitude to make her own path once she emerges from her family's shadow. VERDICT Readers with fond but not necessarily exhaustive memories of Pride and Prejudice will love this story, as will historical fiction readers looking for intelligent heroines with agency and heart who belong to their time and place without quite fitting in.—Marlene Harris, Reading Reality, LLC, Duluth, GA

Mary Bennet, the overlooked and unlikable fifth sister in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, learns to see herself and others clearly in Hadlow's spectacular debut novel (after A Royal Experiment: The Private Life of George III). Born without the beauty her mother prizes or the wit needed to win her father's attention, Mary takes refuge in books and study. By the time her sisters marry and her father dies, Mary's self-esteem, optimism, and trust in others have vanished. Then a happy stay with her aunt and uncle Gardiner in London offers a new perspective, suggesting that she must value herself in order to be valued by others. Naturally for an Austen-inspired novel, with self-awareness comes the possibility of true love. Writing in prose with the crisp liveliness of Austen's own, Hadlow remains true to the characterizations in Pride and Prejudice without letting them limit her. Mary's emergence from priggish insecurity is beautifully imagined; Austen's smarmy Mr. Collins gets a surprising but convincing rehabilitation, the Gardiners are joyously fleshed out, and London, never visited in the Austen canon, comes vividly to life. Equal to the best Austen spin-offs, including Jo Baker's Longbourn, this will delight Janeites as well as lovers of nuanced female coming-of-age tales. (Mar.)