Why Do 19th Century Novels Continue to Appeal to Movie Makers?

That question was recently explored in the Guardian.

From the article...

Yet the fact that the basic narratives have been told so often makes it even more striking that these 19th-century fictions should be the stories that some of the 21st century's leading cinematic talents want to tell next.

Few admirers of the dark contemporary dramas of Andrea Arnold – Fish Tank and Red Road – would have bet on a future project being the Emily Brontë story of ghostly romance made musically famous by Kate Bush. (Although this transition has an interesting precedent: Peter Kosminsky, best known for political and topical dramas and documentaries, also made a movie of Cathy and Heathcliff's story.) And, while Mike Newell has often worked on dramatisations of novels, these have been first takes on tales by contemporary writers (Gabriel García Márquez, JK Rowling, Timothy Mo) rather than an engagement with characters as familiar as Dickens' Pip and Magwitch (Newell has cast Ralph Fiennes), who pop up in TV adaptations about as often as the Olympics.

Joe Wright's desire to direct Keira Knightley as Tolstoy's adulterous heroine is possibly less surprising – director and star have period and mock-period form in Pride and Prejudice and Atonement – but, in choosing this project, they are only a decade away from a high-profile, award-winning Channel 4/PBS mini-series.

This surge of versions is also odd because, in one crucial and possibly ruinous sense, none of these 19th-century classics is well suited to cinema.