Learning to Yearn with Georgia Oakley
When Georgia Oakley was in her final year of secondary school, in Berkshire, England, she went to a movie audition on a lark. She didn’t land a main role—those went to Saoirse Ronan and Romola Garai, who helped propel the film, “Atonement,” to multiple awards in 2007—but she was cast as a nurse. “We had to learn how to fold hospital corners on beds and tie bandages,” Oakley recalled recently. One day on set, she opened a cupboard: it was full of glass bottles with handwritten labels. “They were never going to be seen on camera,” she said. “I just remember thinking, Wow, this is all so that everybody feels like this really is a hospital.” Having taken the gig to make some cash, Oakley emerged with a vocation as a filmmaker.
The other day, Oakley was taking a walk along the towpath of the Regent’s Canal, London’s watery thoroughfare on which construction began in 1812, just after the publication of Jane Austen’s first novel, “Sense and Sensibility.” Oakley has directed a new interpretation of the book, starring Daisy Edgar-Jones as the sensible Elinor Dashwood and Esmé Creed-Miles as her more emotive sister, Marianne. Coming three decades after Ang Lee’s beloved adaptation, Oakley’s film is being promoted as Austen for Gen Z. “I could barely tell you what Gen Z is—all I know is that the marketing team keep using the word ‘yearning,’ ” Oakley, who is thirty-eight, said, dodging a passing e-bike. “Apparently, it’s a Gen Z thing—everyone’s obsessed with yearning. Daisy seems to be the queen of yearning.”
Oakley, who was born only a few miles from Austen’s birthplace, in Hampshire, and grew up outside Oxford, has lived for the past five years in Mallorca, with her wife, Alice Gomme, who runs a textile archive, and their ten-year-old daughter. (They are expecting another child in November.) “We live in the middle of the countryside—there are people driving horse and trap down our road,” Oakley said: very Jane Austen. Much of the movie was shot on location in the southwest of England, and in a still occupied Georgian mansion. “It was a little bit fraying carpets and peeling paint,” Oakley said, with approbation. (An artist made drawings to be stowed in Elinor’s drawer.) The film emphasizes the book’s outdoorsy wildness. “This is not a story where everyone is standing around in drawing rooms,” Oakley said. Thus far, online commentary has focussed on what the trailer reveals of the sisters’ hair, which is often undone, even unkempt. “I felt very strongly that there were certain aspects to a lot of Austen adaptations that kept me at arm’s length from the human experience of the characters,” Oakley explained, rubbing the back of her own cropped head. “We know how women wore their hair when they were having their portrait painted, or when they were attending a ball, let’s say—but we don’t really know how they wore their hair when they weren’t being observed.”
“Sense and Sensibility” is Oakley’s favorite Austen novel. “For me, the central love story was about the sisters—there are these quite clear limitations to the romantic relationships because of the time, whereas the sisterly relationship has no limits,” she said. Their dynamic exists in non-sibling relations, too. “I’m an Elinor, and my wife is a Marianne,” Oakley remarked. As long ago as 1991, the critic Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick detected queer themes in the book; in her essay “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl,” she characterizes the novel’s “erotic axis” as “the unwavering but difficult love” of Elinor for Marianne. Oakley said, “I wouldn’t say I explicitly see it as a queer romance, but there are aspects of it, particularly Marianne’s character, where we are showing a character who is rejecting the status quo. If we were to make that story now, then she probably would be a queer character.” At the same time, Oakley has amplified the romance between Elinor and Edward Ferrars—the latter, in Austen’s text, a more compromised love object than the twinkly-eyed George MacKay of the new version. “I was interested in ‘the good guy,’ ” Oakley said. Meanwhile, Frank Dillane plays Willoughby, Marianne’s love interest, with such commitment that the actor was surprised to learn his character is universally acknowledged to be a scoundrel. “At one point, we were talking about Willoughby as a villain, and Frank was, like, ‘What?’ ” Oakley said, with a laugh.
At a screening in Los Angeles, Oakley was delighted to see younger members of the audience cheering when Willoughby gets his comeuppance and when Elinor and Edward finally kiss. “I should go to the cinema in America more often,” she said. “It was so not British.” A bigger surprise was that, for all the Gen Z talk, men over fifty seemed to love the film. “I guess there’s men over fifty needing a happy ending,” she said. Yearning knows no bounds: very Jane Austen. ♦