The evidence of an affinity between the nineteenth-century novel and screen narrative, and hence the particular felicity of adapting that source, is both theoretical and actual. Film theorists have persuasively argued that film is more suited to adapting novels than plays using the Dickens/Griffith model, although drama offers equal potential for cinematic creativity, as we have seen with respect to Carícies. The supposed parallel between the mimetic capacity of nineteenth-century literary realism and classic narrative film apparently explains adaptors’ attraction to novels of that particular period. Approaching the question from a historical rather than theoretical standpoint, we may alternatively account for the affinity by the two media’s chronological contemporaneity and contiguity. However, neither of these positions sufficiently accounts for the continued preference for adaptations of novels from this period. Critical responses to such adaptations of English literature emphasize ideological explanations. The popularity of the ‘bust and bustles’ period drama formula, such as the Merchant/Ivory productions of the 1980s and the staple of Victorian novel adaptations in British television, is considered a manifestation of the nostalgia of the ‘heritage film’ genre as a whole, discussed in chapter two. However, just as in the preceding chapters I have shown that the relationship between the historical context of a film adaptation and that of its literary source raises issues more complicated than mere nostalgia, a consideration of gender also points beyond the impasse of interpreting the heritage phenomenon exclusively in terms of postmodern superficiality.

The novels of Benito Pérez Galdós, one of Spain’s most renowned and prolific nineteenth-century authors, have been the most frequently adapted in the history of Spanish cinema and television. Nonetheless, considering his œuvre comprises seventy-seven texts, relatively few of these have been adapted, as Spanish screen culture does not seem to share the Anglo- American fixation with the nineteenth-century novel. As detailed in chapter two, in the post-Franco period, Spanish filmmakers have rather turned to the texts of, or about, the civil- and post-war periods as source material for adaptation. This is symptomatic of the neglect of an author such as Galdós, marginalized by political circumstance both in and outside Spain (Jagoe 1994, 1–2). His Fortunata y Jacinta and Leopoldo Alas’s La Regenta, considered to be Spain’s finest nineteenth-century novels, have only been adapted to film once, in 1970 and 1974 respectively. This is astonishing compared to the fate of, say, Dickens or Austen.