Introduction: Agency, Adaptation, and Authorship

Abstract

This book examines contemporary film adaptations directed by women (often working with women screenwriters, producers, and sometimes editors) that foreground the figure of the woman author. All but one are adapted from novels by women writers. The woman author in the film does not always correspond to a figure of the woman author in the novel; and in two films, the figure of the woman author is tangential to the characters’ fantasy of an historical woman author. Mary Eagleton, in her book, Figuring the Woman Author in Contemporary Fiction, argues ‘the need for women to claim cultural legitimacy through authorizing themselves in various ways is indisputable’ (2005: 2). In all the films examined in this book, I see the figure of the woman author in the text functioning as both a representative of female agency and as a vehicle for representing the authorizing of the woman filmmaker, thereby making a claim for the cultural legitimacy of female film authorship. As such, I am following, to an extent, Timothy Corrigan’s argument that ‘Authors on films are only … metaphoric displacements of the real agents of film: sometimes actors but, usually and more effectively, auteurs’ (166). Where I differ with Corrigan is with his unqualified use of the term auteur. Though I am sympathetic to his desire to disrupt the traditional weighting of literary authorship over film authorship in adaptation studies, auteurism is still an exclusionary model of authorship.