SOURCE: "Screening The Mill on the Floss: David Edgar and Peter Hall's George Eliot," in Critical Survey, Vol. 3, No. 3, 1991, pp. 275-82.

In the following essay, Paget discusses preparations for a television adaptation of George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss, noting particularly issues relating to the development of the script, the collaboration of the writer and director, and financial and technical aspects of production.

Introduction—adaptations Ain't What They Used T'be

When I began work on this article, my intention was to follow the process by which a front-rank modern dramatist (David Edgar) and a key post-war theatre director (Sir Peter Hall) adapted a major nineteenth-century novelist's work (George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss), then televised it via the agency of a national broadcasting institution (the BBC). My presuppositions were two-fold: the first was that the article would essentially be about the reading of a novel inevitably...