Screening Novel Women: From British Domestic Fiction to Film (Electronic book text)

From Hollywood classics like Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights to the 1990s wave of Jane Austen films, adaptations of the British nineteenth-century novel have been sensationally popular. Screening Novel Women offers a sophisticated analysis of how the cinema has captivated audiences by refashioning nineteenth-century novels in terms of twentieth-century anxieties about women. British domestic novels explore the tension between the rich and varied desires of women and a culture that idealized their role in the home. During the Depression, World War II and the 1990s, when gender roles changed rapidly, British and American filmmakers used the domestic novels of the past to construct stable gender ideals for the present. Screening Novel Women reveals how these film adaptations, like their literary sources, offer complex and often contradictory responses to their culture's changing ideas about women, marriage and the home.