The Writer on Film: Screening Literary Authorship

Abstract

In his essay on Virginia Woolf, written in 1926, Edwin Muir considers how it would be if authors of fiction were able to inhabit the very worlds they had created. Woolf, he writes, ‘might walk into her novels and be at home in them’; likewise, ‘Jane Austen, we feel, is always at the excursions and tea parties she describes; she is one of the characters, the least observed and the most observant of them all’.1 Muir points out, however, that not all writers would assimilate into their imagined storyworlds as easily as Austen or Woolf. Whether they like or identify with their characters, writers rarely bear a true resemblance to the heroes they have drawn in fiction. In some ways it is this dilemma that lies at the heart of the debate running through many of the contributions to The Writer on Film, a welcome new collection exploring the representation of writers and writing on screen. As R. Barton Palmer discusses in his essay on Ernest Hemingway, although Hemingway's fiction was purported to be largely autobiographical, in real life his struggle to keep up the persona he created as a writer caused him great anguish. Writers may be quite different from the characters they pen, but as Judith Buchanan points out in her Introduction, ‘Savvily recognizing the satisfaction to be had in believing fiction to be only lightly coded autobiography, the film industry has frequently harnessed and extended that interpretive habit to generate a symbiotic process of exchange between writers and their work’ (p. 26). It is the mismatch between the authors and their heroes that often causes biopics to fail the writer so miserably, with their attempts to depict them in worlds not dissimilar to their fictional ones. Many contributors to this collection, for example, describe the awkwardness of the bid by the creators of Becoming Jane (Julian Jarrold, 2007) to amalgamate Austen's own story with the characters from her fiction. If, as Muir writes, Austen is more likely to be on the sidelines observing the drama than taking an active part in it, her transposition to one of the central characters in her own fictional worlds is likely to miss the mark. But watching from the sidelines, or, for that matter, writing from the sidelines, as this volume explores in some detail, does not necessarily make for the most cinematic of subjects. As Buchanan writes, ‘since a dramatically fraught seething in the inner world may be made manifest in the outer only minimally (if at all), locating the dramatic action for a film about literary process can prove a challenge’ (p. 3).