natural

LONDON — It’s the day after the London premiere of “Sense and Sensibility,” and its stars, Daisy Edgar-Jones and Esmé Creed-Miles, have shed the glamour of the evening before. Both are curled in chairs in an otherwise empty room in an upscale Hyde Park Corner hotel, modestly dressed in jeans, sneakers and casual tops. Each drinks from an enormous glass bottle of water rather than wasting time with a cup.

The spectacle of a blockbuster red carpet is familiar for Edgar-Jones, whose career took off after the 2020 limited series “Normal People” and has since included “Where the Crawdads Sing” and “Twisters.” But last night marked the biggest such occasion so far for Creed-Miles, best known for the Prime series “Hanna.”

“I was a bit nervous with my friends and family all there,” admits Creed-Miles, who plays the more emotional of Jane Austen’s Dashwood sisters, Marianne. “I’m very lucky because Daisy has done it before and she’s so cool about it.”

“Absolutely not,” says Edgar-Jones, who plays the sensible Elinor. She grins sheepishly. “If anything, I think I’m getting more nervous.”

Both actors understood the high stakes of remaking Austen’s 1811 debut novel, most famously adapted in 1995 by screenwriter and star Emma Thompson and director Ang Lee — a movie that became a generational touchstone nominated for seven Oscars. The new version, in theaters Friday, was adapted by Diana Reid and directed by Georgia Oakley, best known for her evocative 2022 feature debut, “Blue Jean.”

Oakley wanted to re-create the emotions of reading the book as a teenager.

“In comparison to other Austen novels, I remember it feeling quite wild,” Oakley says, speaking separately over Zoom. “I also wanted to capture the spirit of the two older sisters as the beating heart of the story. My memory of it was that their story was the main love story of the book.”

Daisy Edgar-Jones, left, as Elinor and Esmé Creed-Miles as Marianne in a new version of “Sense and Sensibility.”

(Focus Features)

Oakley’s “Sense and Sensibility” emphasizes that relationship between Elinor and Marianne. Although they approach the world differently, they find common ground in each other. It was essential to find the right actor for each role, but also to ensure there was both tension and chemistry between them. Edgar-Jones, 28, was cast first without an audition. There was never any question as to which sister she would play.

“I have played a significant Marianne before,” Edgar-Jones says in a nod to affluent, tortured outcast Marianne Sheridan, her role in “Normal People.” “And I love both characters, but I’m moving into my late 20s now. Elinor has a maturity and a wise older soul quality that I really liked and felt I was right to occupy. I have always been attracted to characters who don’t necessarily have the words to express how they feel.”

Oakley appreciated Edgar-Jones’ restraint. “She is able to show so much by seemingly doing very little,” Oakley says. “Elinor has a lot on her shoulders, so I was looking for an actor who could give a sense of that from the very beginning.”

Creed-Miles, 26, faced a more uphill climb to become Marianne. She describes her first audition as awful.

“It was really bad,” she says. “Maybe I was nervous. I can be a bit of a mess. But someone saw something in me, I guess, and they called me back. This time I worked my ass off and spent days preparing the scenes. They liked that audition enough to bring me in for chemistry reads with Daisy and some of the boys.”

“There’s an earthy, undone nature to the world Georgia made,” Edgar-Jones says of director Oakley’s take on Austen.

(Erik Carter / For The Times)

“The first audition didn’t go exactly to plan,” says Oakley, who didn’t expect to see the actor again. “But [the second time] I was so moved by Esmé performance. We have this idea of how we think people are supposed to speak in a period drama, and Esmé seemed to not be affected by any of that.”

Edgar-Jones and Creed-Miles had previously worked together on the 2018 drama “Pond Life,” which was an asset going into “Sense and Sensibility.”

“It’s a summer I have never forgotten,” Edgar-Jones says of the experience, her first film role. “I met Esmé and we fell in love. We watched a lot of ‘Love Island.’ And then COVID happened and we weren’t reunited until our chemistry read.”

Although they hadn’t completely stayed in touch, there was a natural rhythm between them. “We had so much history and nothing was ever overly discussed,” Edgar-Jones adds. “It was instinctual. That level of intimacy takes time to develop and the fact that I already had years with Esmé meant that it felt very lived in.”

“Sense and Sensibility” was filmed entirely on location around England, primarily in the sweeping countrysides and dramatic coasts of Devon and Dorset. Oakley wanted to emphasize nature and to show how the Dashwood women’s emotional landscapes evolved alongside the shifting landscapes around them, both in the countryside at Barton Cottage and in the more confining social landscape of London. There is a naturalistic aesthetic to the film, augmented by the locations, the costumes and the hair and makeup design. The characters wear muted, sweeping gowns, their hair often loose.

“There’s an earthy, undone nature to the world Georgia made,” Edgar-Jones says. “Sometimes there’s distance you can sometimes get from watching a period drama because obviously we no longer wear corsets and bonnets and ride in horse-drawn carriages. But even though this feels very much of the Regency time, it also feels very close.”

“I loved how authentic everything felt,” Creed-Miles adds. “It didn’t feel frilly for the sake of itself. The clothes helped me find a sense of Marianne. I needed the costumes to close that gap.”

“We wore no makeup, even to the point where sometimes I’d put on some lip balm and Georgia would be like, ‘Take it off,’ ” Edgar-Jones recalls.

“The characters started to feel like real people in my life who I knew,” says Creed-Miles. “It was almost like a split personality.”

(Erik Carter / For The Times)

Creed-Miles says the unbuttoned aesthetic felt more true to the time, even if some commenters online have claimed it’s not period accurate.

“We don’t have depictions of women’s internal lives in the way that we do now,” she says. “When you look at a portrait there’s a composure that’s not the same as having a phone picture of someone when they’re getting out of bed in the morning.”

Oakley fills the screen with a palpable yearning. The camera often lingers over the actors’ faces, revealing Elinor’s inner turmoil and Marianne’s dramatic heartbreak. For many scenes, Oakley asked the cast to do silent takes.

“We wanted to tell a story that had space for some quieter moments,” the director says. “The actors were free to speak or make noises, but they couldn’t say the words of the scene.”

“In making this, I realized Elinor isn’t devoid of emotion,” Edgar-Jones says. “She’s full of it, but she’s learned how to govern it. Realizing that she was an extraordinarily passionate person and not a stone was really important for me. By the end, I felt completely marinated in it.”

“The characters started to feel like real people in my life who I knew,” Creed-Miles agrees. “It was almost like a split personality.”

“Circumstances have changed for young women quite drastically over the past 200 years,” director Oakley says. “But the fundamental contradictions around what it means to be a young woman haven’t changed nearly as much as we would like to think.”

(Erik Carter / For The Times)

Oakley’s interpretation of “Sense and Sensibility” has a wistful, almost Brontë-like quality. You can feel each character’s pain and joy and hopefulness. At the premiere, the audience audibly gasped and cheered, even though Austen’s story is well known to many. Oakley didn’t want to make her film overly contemporary, but she feels the story resonates today because Austen is so timeless.

“Circumstances have changed for young women quite drastically over the past 200 years,” Oakley says. “But the fundamental contradictions around what it means to be a young woman haven’t changed nearly as much as we would like to think. There’s this enormous gap between what we tell young women that they can reasonably expect from their lives and what the world is prepared to offer them.”

Creed-Miles admits that she’s recently fought with someone on Instagram about whether Austen was a feminist.“They didn’t have that terminology back then, but she was a rebellious author in that she used these sociocultural structures to explore the trials and tribulations of femininity,” Creed-Miles says. “It was really important to Georgia that we kept that alive. Reading Austin as an adult, I have so much respect and admiration for the themes she was exploring with a really deft hand. It’s never rammed down your throat.”

Edgar-Jones, an Austen fan, agrees that she captured a truth about the human experience. That’s what allows the author’s work to be retold and reimagined over decades.

“The joy of adaptation is that every new person who says these words will bring a piece of themselves and give it new meaning,” Edgar-Jones says. “And every time we explore something again, it will be colored with the context of today. Great art, like this, should be brought to life again and again.”

A grainy photograph, dated 1938, hangs in a frame on the downstairs wall of my B&B. It shows 100, perhaps 200, elegantly attired trippers sitting on the green at Shipley Glen in West Yorkshire. They’re picnicking, chatting, taking the air and enjoying the sunshine, while admiring the rocks and woods that frame the deep gully below. It’s local, low-carbon, cheap-as-chips tourism before the jet age – and also a model for how we may travel in the future.

I arrived here thanks to a new trail, launching on 19 September, that runs through the also newly established Bradford Pennine Gateway national nature reserve – astonishingly, the first reserve of this kind to be created in West Yorkshire. The trail uses almost the same name and is a savvy bit of sustainable planning, connecting the three towns of Ilkley, Saltaire and Haworth but, by appealing to walkers, hopefully inspiring people to explore beyond the confines of these honeypots.

I began at Ilkley on a Monday morning. I’d been on its moor once before, for a long circular hike. But I actually prefer linear walks, and it felt like a challenge to start out by crossing the moor. The first half hour was all upward, with lots of stone staircases and some steep sections. A hovering kestrel welcomed me to the top as a reward.

In fact, the great ridge of moorland above Ilkley is called Rombalds Moor; named after a legendary giant, and which comprises several named moors. I tramped across Ilkley, Burley and Bingley moors in a single lunge, stopping only a few times to drink water, take in the massive views back to the “golf ball” radomes of RAF Menwith Hill near Harrogate, over to Leeds – increasingly a high-rise city – and down to the Emley Moor transmitter near Wakefield (the tallest freestanding structure in the UK), and to admire the Twelve Apostles stone circle near the summit.

I had an easy downward stroll before ascending, more gently this time, to the shoulder of Baildon Moor. The vegetation on these moors is mainly heather (pinkish purple now), dense swathes of bracken, tough upland grasses and peat bog, broken up by gritstone outcrops. The NNR designation recognises that it is an area rich in biodiversity, for flora and fauna, and that it plays an important role in tackling challenges like the climate crisis, floods and wildfires. I was walking more than I was watching, but I clocked skylarks, meadow pipits, wheatears, swallows and, on the south side of Baildon, a colony of tree sparrows. As well as clusters of forestry conifers, there were patches of native trees, including birch, rowan and elder, and the occasional willow. Though it’s not wild all the way: I passed tourist chalets, crossed a few fast roads, and walked through a busy golf course (where there were benches, few and far between on the first half of the trail).

The moors are dotted with human history. A big hole, like a meteor crater, turned out to be an abandoned pit, for extracting coal in the preindustrial era. Signage and traces in the landscape point to second world war tank training. Quarries litter the moorlands and dry-stone walls and extensive ditches point to centuries of management.

The trail is 18 miles (28.9km) long. I could probably have walked it in a day with a bit of effort. I’m glad I didn’t, not least because Shipley Glen was a revelation. Despite having visited nearby Saltaire several times, I’d never gone up the hill to see the ravine, which probably became a “glen” because it sounded Scottish and picturesque. For more than a century and a half, it has served many purposes: as a place for radical rallies and suffragettes’ meetings, a temperance hotel and teashop, Victorian pleasure gardens and quirky amusements and rides – and a tramway, opened in 1895, which still operates. I recommend breaking the walk here, even if it’s not quite a midpoint, because the setting is glorious; Bracken Hall House is a gorgeous B&B (doubles from £110 a night), and Saltaire is full of art, industrial history, and great food and drink. There are benches beside the glen, if you decided to pause for a picnic.

While overnighting, I met Danny Jackson, the former countryside and rights of way manager for Bradford council, who devised and plotted the trail. “I want to change people’s perceptions of what Bradford is,” he said. “It’s not just a city. It’s a district. And it’s very rural.

“I also want to highlight things that are overlooked. Through the NNR and the trail, we want to maximise the benefits from air quality, carbon capture, wildfire and flood reduction, rewetting, peat restoration – and obviously all the health benefits from being outdoors.”

From Shipley Glen, I walked on via a series of nature-rich spots to Haworth. The first, Trench Meadows, is a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI), notable for its grasses and wildflowers, including red fescue, sweet vernal and crested dog’s-tail. The path took me through an elaborate beautiful old kissing gate, and along cobbled and flagged paths; Victorians and Edwardians made their footpaths beautiful as well as functional – and built them to last.

I passed through Bingley by way of several smart housing estates above the town. I recalled John Braine’s 1957 novel, Room at the Top, set precisely in these airy heights; the novelist renamed it “Warley”, perhaps to make more locally innocuous his tale of social-climbing and adultery. The trail takes in the Five Rise Locks and Three Rise Locks sections of the Leeds-Liverpool canal, which I had only ever spied from the main road. Between the two lock-ladders is Bingley North Bog – a small but precious site that supports a variety of insects, birds and amphibians.

Over the previous 10 miles or so, I’d swapped Wharfedale for Airedale and now found myself walking along attractive stretches of the River Aire. At Bingley St Ives, I skirted a large pond full of waders, another golf club and a large equestrian centre; some mouldering old properties had ecclesiastical-looking doorways, perhaps harking back to the pre-dissolution period when the estate was in the hands of Rievaulx Abbey and Drax Priory. A splendid hide has been built where you can watch bullfinches, goldcrests and siskins that come to use the feeders.

I got my first proper blast of a west wind on Harden Moor – the third of the day’s special sites, being a very rare dry heath alongside mixed woodland, and an ideal habitat for bees (including the nationally scarce tormentil mining bee), wasps, spiders, flies, grasshoppers and other invertebrates. With Haworth now on my mind, slightly irritating Kate Bush-related earworms began to wriggle. I had a cheese butty and tea at a suitably Heathcliffian area called Catstones End, all wild heather and quarried rocks – with huge boulders forming natural sculptures.

Rain came in with the wind and I got absolutely drenched on the final approach to Haworth. But soon after, I was entering Bradford’s prettiest township and thinking about coffee and cake. The walk officially ends at Penistone Hill country park, but after taking walking therapy a few years ago, I am no longer a completist – and was satisfied with my walk and mini achievement. I bowed out on Haworth high street, without so much as a glance at the Brontë Parsonage Museum.

The visit was supported by Bradford Culture Company, which is developing projects related to the 2025 UK City of Culture

Ilkley, Saltaire and Haworth are easy to reach by train or bus. If arriving by car, park at Keighley and use the 62 bus to get to Ilkley and the B1, B2 and B3 Brontëbuses to travel from Haworth back to Keighley