Silent Film Adaptations of Novels by British and American Women Writers, 1903-1929

Book excerpt: Silent Film Adaptations of Novels by British and American Women Writers, 1903–1929 focuses on fifty-three silent film adaptations of the novels of acclaimed authors George Eliot, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Mary Shelley, Louisa May Alcott, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Willa Cather, and Edith Wharton. Many of the films are unknown or dismissed, and most of them are degraded, destroyed, or lost—burned in warehouse fires, spontaneously combusted in storage cans, or quietly turned to dust. Their content and production and distribution details are reconstructed through archival resources as individual narratives that, when considered collectively, constitute a broader narrative of lost knowledge—a fragmented and buried early twentieth-century story now reclaimed and retold for the first time to a twenty-first-century audience. This collective narrative also demonstrates the extent to which the adaptations are intertextually and ideologically entangled with concurrently released early “woman’s films” to re-promote and re-instill the norm of idealized white, married, domesticated womanhood during a time of extraordinary cultural change for women. Retelling this lost narrative also allows for a reassessment of the place and function of the adaptations in the development of the silent film industry and as cinematic precedent for the hundreds of sound adaptations of the literary texts of these eight women writers produced from 1931 to the 2020s.