For two seasons and a half of Netflix’s Bridgerton, Polly Walker‘s Portia Featherington has been painted as the bad guy to her daughters Prudence (Bessie Carter), Phillipa (Harriet Cains), and, particularly, Penelope (Nicola Coughlan). Desperate for her girls to get an advantageous match, Portia has gone to such lengths as forcing her youngest to debut one year earlier than recommended and swindling the whole ton just to keep a hold of her vanishing fortune. Unless you are super into watching scammers and helicopter moms do their thing — and, hey, there’s nothing wrong with that! — chances are that you have found yourself hating Portia Featherington at least once over the past four years, either because you can’t stand how she treats Penelope or because you simply loath her disdain for the titular Bridgertons. In a show that doesn’t exactly have a villain, Portia has long occupied the role of the despicable antagonist, someone we can all agree to dislike — that is, of course, until Part 2 of Bridgerton Season 3 dropped.

Indeed, things have taken quite a turn in these last four episodes of Bridgerton. Through conversations with her maid, Mrs. Varley (Lorraine Ashbourne), and with her daughter Penelope, Portia Featherington has revealed a whole new side of her personality. Or, rather, she has shown us what we already knew, but now laced with layers of context that make her much easier to sympathize with. It turns out that Lady Featherington has never pressured their daughters into getting married or having children out of the meanness of her heart. Instead, much like Penelope, Eloise (Claudia Jessie), and any other woman in the world of Bridgerton, her personality developed as a response to the pressures that surround her. However, instead of rebelling against the forces that hold her down, Portia simply understands how the world works and now seeks to keep her family afloat in circumstances that are constantly against them.

‘Bridgerton’ Season 3 Sees a Shift in Portia’s Character

Season 3 of Bridgerton kicks off with Portia Featherington being her same old kind of mean, albeit extremely funny, self. No matter how much we enjoy seeing her explain the birds and the bees to her two adult daughters, we have to concede that her constant nagging for Prudence and Phillipa to conceive and have a male heir is more than a little bit unpleasant. And, boy, her constant hovering over Penelope as she’s trying to get closer to Lord Debling (Sam Philips) sure does more harm than good. It is no thanks to her that Penelope manages to attract his attention, and she’s nothing but horrible to her daughter once Debling decides to break things off. She blames Penelope for the failure of the engagement and the kindest words that she has to say is that it might not be so bad to be a spinster. When Penelope finally manages to win over Colin’s (Luke Newton) heart, she’s equally unpleasant, making rude remarks about how much money the Bridgertons have and how they will help her social standing. But after Colin bemoans her for being so concerned with status, we see a shift in her characterization.

It all starts with a conversation with Varley, in which Portia wonders what is so wrong about wanting to preserve one’s status. This then progresses to a heart-to-heart between her and Penelope in which she shows joy at her daughter marrying out of love and opens up about having chosen security. In the end, Portia reveals, she didn’t even get that, as Lord Featherington (Ben Miller) squandered his wealth by gambling all the way back in Season 1. Heck, he even ended up getting killed because of his debts! Portia then goes on to say that she merely hoped her daughters would do better than she did, and, in another conversation, confesses to being jealous of Penelope, because her daughter has managed to create a place for herself in the world through Lady Whistledown (voiced by Julie Andrews).

This is a far cry from the woman who once only spoke to her children to make them feel bad about themselves. Portia undergoes a sort of redemption in more ways than one. First and foremost, she makes up for the horrible things she has done, at least to Penelope, through her words. It might not seem enough, but, hey, if Pen found it in herself to forgive her mother, then so should we. Secondly, we finally understand where Portia is coming from, why she behaves the way she does. If she’s controlling about her daughters’ matches, that’s because she doesn’t want them to end up in the same situation that she did. And if she can’t understand how a woman might have dreams of her own, that’s because no one ever taught her that was a possibility. However, the context in which Portia lives and how it impacts her character goes way beyond that.

Inheritance Laws in ‘Bridgerton’ Times Were Heavily Stacked Against Women

Now, it is often repeated that women could not inherit property during the period known as the British Regency, i.e., Bridgerton times. That is a myth, and Jane Austen novels such as Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility have their fair share of examples of women who have full control of their land and money. Think Lady Catherine de Bourgh. However, to avoid breaking off properties and doing away with titles, the most common thing that happened was for the inheritance to be left entirely to the closest male heir, either through primogeniture (the property passes to the oldest son) or through entail (the property passes to someone chosen by its original owner). In Pride and Prejudice, for instance, Mr. Bennet’s estate is entailed to the next male heir because the person that Mr. Bennet inherited the property from so determined. This is why Elizabeth and the others have no inheritance, and even if they did, the property would be shared among them, making them considerably poorer. To make matters worse, whenever a woman married, her properties were passed on to her husband.

It’s in this social context that Portia was brought up. She has no properties or titles, for, even if she had, they would have been given to Lord Featherington when they married. Furthermore, much like the Bennet’s estate, the Featherington house and waning fortune are entailed to the next male heir, the now infamous Cousin Jack (Rupert Young). It’s to avoid the sudden appearance of another unknown heir that might make her and her daughters destitute that Lady Featherington forges the papers saying that her husband’s fortune shall be left to his first male grandson. And it’s to make sure that her daughters will have a future if everything goes wrong that she forces them to debut early and pressures them to find a match as quickly as possible. The Featherington family has no kindly Anthony Bridgerton (Jonathan Bailey) to count on, so their matriarch must make do.

This makes Portia Featherington very similar to one of the most well-known and most maligned Jane Austen characters: Mrs. Bennet. Now, Mrs. Bennet might not be a swindler, but, throughout Pride and Prejudice, she’s more than a little insistent on finding her daughters good matches and concerned about money and status to the point where she is heard blabbering about how wealthy one of their fiancés is, putting the whole relationship in jeopardy. This does not come out of the blue, though. Mrs. Bennet only has daughters and is set to lose her elderly husband very soon, so it is natural for her to be at least a little desperate when it comes to their future. Likewise, Portia is a recent widow who has no control over an estate that should be hers and whose daughters are facing certain poverty or a life kept by the charity of distant relatives. To look at all this evidence and still consider her a villain for her smothering attitude and her constant concern about financial issues is more than a little misguided.

‘Bridgerton’s Portia Featherington Still Has Her Flaws

Now, this isn’t to say that Portia Featherington is a completely flawless individual. She could certainly be more open with her daughters, particularly someone as bright as Penelope, about their family’s difficulties instead of merely pushing them around. She’s disdainful, envious, always finds something to criticize about others, and, most of all, she is a swindler. But it is about time for us to recognize that she is not all bad, and Bridgerton is fully aware of that. Season 3 is not just the love story of Penelope and Colin, or Penelope and Eloise, it is also the love story of Penelope and her mother. Portia fully deserved to put her cards out and be understood as the flawed human being that she is — a human being that might be kind of off-putting, but that isn’t incapable of love.

Perhaps no scene is more revealing in that sense than the moment in which Penelope storms out after Portia accuses her of driving Lord Debling away. In a delicate performance, Polly Walker shows us that Portia is heartbroken when she realizes just how distraught her daughter is. She wants to say something comforting to her, but she just doesn’t know what. She thought she was doing what was best for her daughter, but she only ended up hurting her. In the end, Portia Featherington is not a bad human being, though she can be fairly cruel on certain occasions. She’s just the person that she needs to be to survive.

Bridgerton Season 3 is available to stream on Netflix in the U.S.