…Not really, though? I mean, here's Edmund's report of how Mary reacts to Henry's running off with Edmund's sister:
‘Why would not she [Fanny] have him? It is all her fault. Simple girl! I shall never forgive her. Had she accepted him as she ought, they might now have been on the point of marriage, and Henry would have been too happy and too busy to want any other object. He would have taken no pains to be on terms with Mrs. Rushworth again. It would have all ended in a regular standing flirtation, in yearly meetings at Sotherton and Everingham.’
The thing that horrifies Edmund is not that Mary is concerned about her brother and his sister; it's that she thinks Fanny should have married Henry, and then everything would have been fine because he only would have flirted with Maria once or twice a year. It's that she thinks Henry and Maria have only indulged in a bit of "folly" as opposed to, say, adultery and incontinence. It's that she's not upset at what they did, just that they got caught doing it. I mean, we might dislike Fanny and Edmund for holding the serious, even reproving religious views that they hold (though I love them both, actually), but they are real 18thc/19thc values. Mary's take - that Maria should leave her husband and then marry Henry, since they don't have any other option - might be practical or socially adept from our point of view, but her lack of any feeling about this is genuinely immoral from the narrator's point of view, who uses words like "guilt and infamy" about what Henry and Maria have done; it's not just Fanny and Edmund who think this way. Here's the narrator describing Sir Thomas trying to get his daughter away from Henry: "Sir Thomas, however, remained yet a little longer in town, in the hope of discovering and snatching her from farther vice, though all was lost on the side of character." This is a BIG deal, and the fact that Mary doesn't see it as such - that she doesn't see it as an issue of character, just an issue of expediency - is precisely the problem. It's not a plus.
(The narrator's remark also indicates that the family actually isn't planning on just letting Maria twist in the breeze; and if you remember, she ultimately moves in with Mrs. Norris. It's true that Sir Thomas won't let her back into the house - after she refuses to leave Henry, and stays with him for months until they finally hate each other and separate; things might have been different if she had come away at first. But he has no plans to let her beg in the streets, either: "As a daughter, he hoped a penitent one, she should be protected by him, and secured in every comfort, and supported by every encouragement to do right, which their relative situations admitted; but farther than that he could not go.")
Also…Mary might fall in love with Edmund, but that doesn't stop her from wanting him to change completely, so I'm not sure how valuable that is. She's happy when she gets him to do things against his moral code: "His sturdy spirit to bend as it did! Oh! it was sweet beyond expression." I know acting in a play is not a big deal from a modern perspective, so who cares if he performs in the play, right? But Edmund cares, and Mary knows that he cares, and yet she's glad that she makes him turn aside from what he thinks is right. I find that genuinely horrific, as a way to treat someone you purport to love.
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‘Why would not she [Fanny] have him? It is all her fault. Simple girl! I shall never forgive her. Had she accepted him as she ought, they might now have been on the point of marriage, and Henry would have been too happy and too busy to want any other object. He would have taken no pains to be on terms with Mrs. Rushworth again. It would have all ended in a regular standing flirtation, in yearly meetings at Sotherton and Everingham.’
The thing that horrifies Edmund is not that Mary is concerned about her brother and his sister; it's that she thinks Fanny should have married Henry, and then everything would have been fine because he only would have flirted with Maria once or twice a year. It's that she thinks Henry and Maria have only indulged in a bit of "folly" as opposed to, say, adultery and incontinence. It's that she's not upset at what they did, just that they got caught doing it. I mean, we might dislike Fanny and Edmund for holding the serious, even reproving religious views that they hold (though I love them both, actually), but they are real 18thc/19thc values. Mary's take - that Maria should leave her husband and then marry Henry, since they don't have any other option - might be practical or socially adept from our point of view, but her lack of any feeling about this is genuinely immoral from the narrator's point of view, who uses words like "guilt and infamy" about what Henry and Maria have done; it's not just Fanny and Edmund who think this way. Here's the narrator describing Sir Thomas trying to get his daughter away from Henry: "Sir Thomas, however, remained yet a little longer in town, in the hope of discovering and snatching her from farther vice, though all was lost on the side of character." This is a BIG deal, and the fact that Mary doesn't see it as such - that she doesn't see it as an issue of character, just an issue of expediency - is precisely the problem. It's not a plus.
(The narrator's remark also indicates that the family actually isn't planning on just letting Maria twist in the breeze; and if you remember, she ultimately moves in with Mrs. Norris. It's true that Sir Thomas won't let her back into the house - after she refuses to leave Henry, and stays with him for months until they finally hate each other and separate; things might have been different if she had come away at first. But he has no plans to let her beg in the streets, either: "As a daughter, he hoped a penitent one, she should be protected by him, and secured in every comfort, and supported by every encouragement to do right, which their relative situations admitted; but farther than that he could not go.")
Also…Mary might fall in love with Edmund, but that doesn't stop her from wanting him to change completely, so I'm not sure how valuable that is. She's happy when she gets him to do things against his moral code: "His sturdy spirit to bend as it did! Oh! it was sweet beyond expression." I know acting in a play is not a big deal from a modern perspective, so who cares if he performs in the play, right? But Edmund cares, and Mary knows that he cares, and yet she's glad that she makes him turn aside from what he thinks is right. I find that genuinely horrific, as a way to treat someone you purport to love.