Adaptation, Authorship, and Contemporary Women Filmmakers

Shelley Cobb explores film adaptations directed by women (often working with women screenwriters, producers, and sometimes editors) that foreground the figure of the female author. Through analysis of the films themselves, and their reception and discussion of the cultural and industrial contexts in which these films were released, she sees the figure of the woman author functioning as a representative of female agency. A lively discussion of costume dramas to women's films, the figure of the woman author comes to the fore as a key site for expressing the authority of the woman filmmaker.

Shelley Cobb is Lecturer in Film and English at the University of Southampton, UK. She has published widely in the areas of adaptation, women filmmakers and celebrity studies, and is the co-editor, with Neil Ewen, of First Comes Love: Power Couples, Celebrity Kinship, and Cultural Politics (2015).

Acknowledgements
Introduction: Agency, Adaptation and Authorship
1. Envisioning Judith Shakespeare: Collaboration and the Woman Author
2. Adapt or Die: The Dangers of Women's Authorship
3. Authorizing the Mother: Sisterhoods in America
4. Postfeminist Austen: by Women, for Women, about Women
Conclusion: The Secret Life of Bees and Authorial Subversion
Bibliography
Endnotes