Diane Sadoff. Victorian Vogue: British Novels on Screen. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. ISBN: 978-0816660926. Price: US$75.00

British heritage film, the decades-old genre that adapts prestigious literary works and summons echoes of a stable national past, has by now achieved its own stature and solidity, its own brand. Dianne Sadoff’s study interrogates this genre—not, as other critics have done, to offer a wholesale critique of the ideological project of heritage, but rather to describe and account for the type of historical consciousness that heritage culture presents. She makes two primary claims, the first of which, if unsurprising in the abstract, is often disregarded: that heritage film is historically embedded, that it tells a story about its own moment. Beyond this, Sadoff claims that heritage cinema is intrinsically self-reflexive about its own styles of retrospection. As a “hypermediated” form (49), repurposing texts that are themselves mediations, heritage film tends, according to Sadoff, to forego the sense of immediacy and immersion central to mainstream Hollywood film and to thematize its own distance from its subject matter. Therefore, far from having any uniform ideological tendency, heritage film lends itself well to political contest, remediating source texts in ways that are sometimes conservative and sometimes oppositional, and often reinflecting the very political debates that gripped the culture from which the source texts emerged. Throughout this study, Sadoff is insistently materialist, looking not only at the broader cultural situations of both nineteenth-century fiction and twentieth-century heritage, but also at the changes in the film industry that made heritage a saleable commodity and even a hot property. Acutely self-aware, heritage films read their source texts with an eye to their own aesthetic and commercial situation. As a result, the stories they tell are implicitly allegorical, refashioning nineteenth-century novels into commentaries on the value of modern-day heritage culture. Sadoff’s allegorical readings are ingenious. In Jane Austen’s “taste-capable lesser-gentry female” (19), heritage filmmakers find a fit emblem for their own professional-managerial middle-class consumer, managing her status anxiety through the conspicuous consumption of high-cultural art. Similarly, heritage adaptations of Henry James, pursuing crossover popularity, invite middlebrow spectators to identify with James’s American girls who go to Europe in search of acculturation and sophistication. Sadoff’s other allegorical claims focus on the aesthetics of heritage film. She sees questions of sexual fidelity, particularly in the Austen and Brontë sisters films, as bearing on the debate over fidelity aesthetics which recurs in discussions of film adaptation. In heritage cinema’s gothic stories of technological reproduction, Sadoff finds an analogue to the heritage aesthetics of citation and mediation. And Sadoff argues for an affinity between the specularity of the gay sentimental look, centered on the figure of Oscar Wilde and best represented in The Portrait of Dorian Gray (1890), and the cinematic specularity foregrounded in films like Gods and Monsters (1998) and Orlando (1992). Beyond these broader allegorical claims, Sadoff shows a host of specific ways in which films and serials appropriate and remediate nineteenth-century novels in relation to present concerns. While Robert Leonard’s 1940 Pride and Prejudice evokes and tries to sooth status anxiety during the uncertain war years, Fay Weldon’s 1979 dramatization suggests “liberalism’s social and political impasse” at the end of a decade when many women were entering the workplace (31). In the 1990s, the sudden destabilization of conventional sexual arrangements found expression in Austen’s courtship plots, while the extramarital couplings of Michael Winterbottom’s Jude (1996) and Alfonso Cuarón’s Great Expectations (1998) (echoing the “twisted passion” of the 40s Brontë films) reimagine “romance as hookup” (83, 89). The late-century vampire film “excites and soothes fears about communication-technological explosion, sexually transmitted disease pandemics, and a sensed impending global and national financial panic” (114), while the Frankenstein franchise blossoms in …