Adapting Anne(s): women writing and writing women on screen

Anna Frank to Anne Lister by Ros Ballaster

in collaboration with the Anne Lister Society

Writing might seem to be a difficult thing to treat in a form that is mainly visual and spoken. When we watch characters write they seem to withdraw from us as viewers, to enter their own private worlds. We will take a closer look at ‘queeriod dramas’ about two Annes of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century who left written records of their attachment to other women – Queen Anne in The Favourite and Anne Lister in Gentleman Jack.

Ros Ballaster is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies in the Faculty of English, at the University of Oxford, and Professorial Fellow of English at Mansfield College. She has published widely in the field of eighteenth-century literature and has particular research interests in eighteenth-century drama and fiction, in women’s writing, women’s studies, feminist theory, and oriental fiction. She is the editor of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility for Penguin Classics 1997 (revised ed. 2003); and a collection of essays on The History of British Women’s Writing, 1690 – 1750.  Her other works include Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction 1684-1740; Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England 1662-1785; and, most recently, Fictions of Presence: Theatre and Novel in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Ros is returning to an interest in serial fiction, soap opera, and television history and is currently working toward  a monograph about the Eighteenth Century on the contemporary screen, stage and page.

Part of Writing Women Back into History