Why Has a Role Virtually Guaranteed to Net an Actress an Oscar Nomination Never Made it to the Big Screen?

A while back I wrote an academic article examining certain literary aspects of the novel Evelina by Frances Burney. I published that article without any expectation that it would boost my performance bonus because Evelina is hardly what you would call a blockbuster novel. In fact, I would never have read it had it not been assigned as part of a college literature class I took. I can remember that many of my fellow students were not particularly enthralled by the novel, a progenitor of the type of novel of manners later written by Jane Austen and Edith Wharton. It is also an epistolary novel, one of those books made up of a bunch of letters. I was never a big fan of the epistolary form because it seems so gimmicky, and doesn't allow for much insight. My problems with the form disappeared in the wake of the magnificence of this novel, however.

Like the novels of Jane Austen or Edith Wharton, Evelina is a novel that is concerned with how a young woman without means finds identity and meaning in a patriarchal society. The heroines of these types of novels are invariably faced with the prospect of carving out a route to financial success granted them by marriage, and as a result these women must not only be ruthless, but must be ruthless while appearing to never sacrifice their femininity. Those who characterize movies based on these novels as "chick flicks" succeed only in missing the point. The heroines of these stories have more balls than all the action heroes played by bald men combined.

Evelina, in particular, is a ruthless character and it remains one of the great mysteries of cinema that a film version of this novel has never been made. The fact is that in the hands of a capable screenwriter and director, Evelina is a part tailor made to net some talented young actress an Academy Award. It is particularly strange that Evelina remains untranslated to the screen in light of the rush to get every word that Jane Austen ever wrote to movie theaters across the world. Whereas Austen's characters tend to retain a certain predictability in which their motivations are transparent and unchanging, Frances Burney created in Evelina a character that is often not what she seems. From the very beginning there is a tremendous disconnect between the words that she speaks and the ends that she desires. Perhaps the story is too subtle for filmmakers to risk adapting; I think it more likely they miss the irony. Evelina is described throughout the novel by many characters as being innocent, but in fact she is anything but. She is, indeed, quite coldblooded in using her both her femininity and her youth to her advantage to achieve her aims.

Evelina is a manipulative young lady who routinely censors what others say when relaying the meaning she wishes to convey. This is such a potentially terrific role that it really is bewildering why no one has yet adapted it for the screen. A movie fan can go all the way back to Vivien Leigh and even beyond to imagine a cinematic version that provides a star making role to a talented actress. Considering how often these romantic stories of manners routinely get produced either for the big screen or as something that shows up on Masterpiece Theater, it remains nothing less than amazing that Evelina remains virginal territory. Hollywood has been in a rut for about a decade now, rushing to produce sequels to movies that nobody saw in the first place, jumping on fantasy franchises to become the next Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings, and making any show that appeared on television for at least a season fodder for a big screen treatment. It is particularly saddening to know that a captivating story that contains a character almost guaranteed to nab the actress who plays her at least a nomination for an Academy Award remains a secret.