Canadian playwright Linda Griffiths's Age of Arousal (2007) is recognisably based on George Gissing's novel The Odd Women (1893), yet she described her play as ‘wildly inspired’ by Gissing's text rather than an adaptation of it. Griffiths's resistance to categorising Age of Arousal as an adaptation may be explained in part by her ambivalence about the Merchant Ivory production company's popular movie adaptations of classic British and American novels. Recalling her research process for Age of Arousal, she wrote of ‘dreaming [her] way through many hours of perfectly produced costume drama’ while ‘[feeling] guilty at the same time’:

To recapture something of the original newness of Gissing's novel about the emergence of modern gender roles and related ideas about female sexuality in the late nineteenth century, Griffiths chose to foreground sex in a more explicit way than was possible for Gissing as a writer bound by the social and literary conventions of his time. She also wanted to correct some residual misogyny that she perceived in Gissing's text, despite his extraordinary accomplishment in portraying so many central female characters together in a single work. In Griffiths's note at the start of the published text of Age of Arousal, she describes her approach to Gissing's novel as taking ‘his basic characters and situation and leap[ing] off a cliff’ that she was ‘dying to leap off’. Her writing of Age of Arousal was, in her words, a ‘dance of thievery and creativity […] danced with Gissing floating above, patron saint or appalled spectre’.

In A Theory of Adaptation, Linda Hutcheon notes a critical tendency to view popular adaptations of canonical literary works as ‘inferior and secondary’ to their source texts.