Sense, Sensibility and (Movie) Screens
It’s a truth universally acknowledged that D.C. loves an outdoor movie — doubly so if it’s Jane Austen
At the Jane Austen Film Festival, held annually at Georgetown’s Dumbarton House, the outfits — sundresses — are uniform but the dinners they bring are not. The audience members, mostly women, carry picnic baskets filled with cheese and crackers, Domino’s pizza, sushi and, in some cases, vases of fresh flowers.
For 12 years, audience members have sat on blankets and camp chairs in one of the historic house’s gardens and viewed adaptations of Austen’s classics, including “Emma,” “Love and Friendship,” “Pride and Prejudice,” and “Sense and Sensibility.” The garden, complete with a fountain, and house, carefully restored to look as it did when it was first built in the early 1800s, look like something out of one of Austen’s novels. It’s D.C.’s own version of a Mayfair ballroom.
The festival first started because Dumbarton House was constructed during Britain’s Regency era, the same time that Austen was writing. (The same time is known as the Federal period in the U.S.) For organizers, the overlap in time — even if an ocean separated the countries — offers a chance to understand the cultural context surrounding Dumbarton House’s construction.
For attendees, the festival isn’t just a chance to connect with history. It’s become a beloved annual tradition, a chance to sit outside and enjoy adaptations of their favorite love stories.
“I love an outdoor movie, a cool space and, of course, Jane Austen,” said Elise Patterson, a Capitol Hill resident who has attended the film festival on and off for the past five years. She counts the 2005 “Pride and Prejudice” as her favorite adaptation but adds that she loves introducing people to “Love and Friendship” because “it’s a sleeper hit.”
Jane Austen superfans — Janeites, to the initiates — fill the audience at the film festival, wearing homemade shirts declaring their love of Mr. Darcy. This is a crowd that knows the material: During one screening this summer, staff accidentally started the wrong film. Movie watchers caught the error in seconds. Over the course of four Wednesdays in the summer, attendees laugh at films they’ve seen many times before.
The volume is kept low — so community members in the residential neighborhood aren’t disturbed by the noise — and closed captions are on, but even if audience members miss a line or two, they know the (marriage) plots.
Even with minimal promotion, tickets to the screenings typically sell out within 24 hours because many fans return year after year, according to Mary Lesher, the programs manager at Dumbarton House.
Ted Scheinman, a senior editor of Smithsonian Magazine and author of Camp Austen: My Life as an Accidental Jane Austen Superfan, isn’t surprised by how popular the film festival is. Events celebrating the Pride and Prejudice author, such as the annual meeting of the Jane Austen Society of North America and the University of North Carolina’s Jane Austen Summer, regularly draw big crowds, he explained.
Closer to home, crowds flocked to the Folger Shakespeare Library in 2016, when it displayed the billowing white shirt Colin Firth wore when he dove into a pond in the BBC’s 1995 “Pride and Prejudice” adaptation. Audience members arrive at Dumbarton for the movie screenings more than an hour before they begin, to claim space and enjoy the scenery and each other’s company. And, Austen’s reach extends well beyond the U.S. and the U.K. — there are Jane Austen Societies in Japan, India, Pakistan and Spain, among others.
Scheinman believes there’s a universality to Austen’s work that explains why communities develop around it. Almost all of us, he said, will struggle with a friend who gets engaged to someone we don’t like or have a sibling struggling with a mental health issue.
“Those might not always be sexy questions, but I think Austen addresses them in a way that is really sort of relevant to people. I think it’s like almost being seen by this really, really old author,” he said.
Next year, Dumbarton House plans to host a Jane Austen symposium in addition to the film festival. Visiting scholars will share their research, with a particular focus on what makes the Regency writer’s work still relevant today.
D.C. author Nikki Payne, who wrote Pride and Protest, a Pride and Prejudice retelling set in the District, has spent a lot of time thinking about both how to update Austen and why her work continues to resonate today.
Her adaptation, a sharp departure from the ballrooms and country homes, features a community activist and DJ Liza B., and Dorsey Fitzgerald, the CEO of a property development company trying to fulfill his adoptive parents’ dreams. It uses the structure of Austen’s classic to explore classism, gentrification and racism.
“For people left out of the great financial promise and who then realize the promise wasn’t all that dope, Jane Austen can really connect with them.” Payne said. She explained Austen achieved a certain level of respectability, but was always on the outside because she remained unmarried.
Payne chose D.C. as a setting, not just because of ongoing discussions about development and gentrification but because it fit Liza’s strong, assertive personality.
“People come to this particular region because they’re holding ideas passionately,” she said. “This is a city full of people who come here because they fundamentally and foundationaly believe in big ideas.”
The romance author added that passion is a double-edged sword for people looking for love in the District. But, for anyone who’s found someone — or is just looking for a fresh first date spot — Dumbarton House offers a timeless allure.
