Karly

When people find out that I studied English at postgraduate level, they often assume that my relationship with literature began in a classroom, surrounded by annotated novels, colour-coded notes, and carefully curated reading lists assembled by people far more organised than I have ever been. The truth is considerably messier than that.

I grew up in Mexico and attended a bilingual school, which means English literature was certainly not absent from my education. We read novels, analysed characters, discussed themes, and sat examinations like everyone else. Yet when I think about the books and authors that have shaped me most as a reader, surprisingly few of them entered my life through a syllabus. More often than not, they arrived through a film, a television series, or an actor whose performance intrigued me enough to seek out the original text.

In fact, some of my strongest memories of studying literature at school have very little to do with literature itself.

I distinctly remember reading Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein when I was around twelve, although “reading” may be a generous description because we never actually finished it. Faced with a classroom full of bilingual preteens whose maturity levels fluctuated dramatically depending on the topic at hand, our teacher made the understandable decision to stop somewhere before the wedding night. Whether this was an attempt to preserve our innocence or simply her own sanity remains unclear. Things did not improve when we moved on to The Canterbury Tales.

Anyone who has ever attempted to teach Chaucer to a room full of twelve-year-olds will probably know exactly where this story is heading. Let us simply say that a classroom full of bilingual children discovering certain vocabulary items was never going to produce the sophisticated literary discussion our teacher had likely envisioned, and that poor Chaucer never really stood a chance against the collective immaturity of a group of adolescents who found themselves far more interested in particular words than in medieval social commentary. Looking back, I realise that although school introduced me to literature, it rarely made me fall in love with it. That happened elsewhere.

One of my earliest literary obsessions was Shakespeare, although I arrived at him through a route that would probably horrify traditionalists. A family friend happened to work as Leonardo DiCaprio’s stunt double in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, which gave the film a strangely mythical status in my childhood. I was only five years old and far too young to understand the complexities of the play itself, yet I became fascinated by the story. Long before I encountered Shakespeare in any meaningful academic context, I knew who Romeo and Juliet were, and before long I found myself reading a children’s adaptation of the play. It wasn’t Shakespeare in the purest sense, nor was it the route most literature teachers would recommend, but it was enough to make me curious, and curiosity has always been a far more powerful motivator than obligation.

Dracula arrived in much the same way. Long before I read Bram Stoker’s novel, I was already fascinated by the Count. Like many readers, I encountered Dracula first through adaptations rather than through the original text, and what began as a childhood fascination gradually evolved into a lifelong obsession. To this day, my favourite portrayals remain Gary Oldman’s Dracula and Christian Camargo’s version of the character, both of whom managed to capture something compellingly tragic beneath the fangs and Gothic excess.

Eventually, as these things tend to happen, curiosity led me back to the source material, where I discovered a novel that was far stranger, funnier, and more inventive than I had anticipated. The book I found was not simply a vampire story but an epistolary novel, a travel narrative, a Gothic horror, and a surprisingly modern meditation on communication, technology, and fear, all of which demonstrated that the original text still had the power to surprise me despite years of familiarity with its adaptations. The same pattern would repeat itself throughout my life.

Looking back, I am forced to conclude that a significant portion of my literary education was outsourced to Helena Bonham Carter.

I first encountered A Room with a View through the Merchant Ivory adaptation and, more specifically, through Helena Bonham Carter’s portrayal of Lucy Honeychurch. Like many readers, I fell in love with the film before I ever opened the novel. I loved Lucy’s romanticism, her awkwardness, her intelligence, and the way she slowly begins to realise that the life she actually wants is not necessarily the life others have chosen for her.

Naturally, I read the novel. Then I read Howards End, then Where Angels Fear to Tread, then more Forster.

What began as an admiration for one performance gradually developed into a genuine affection for Forster’s writing, his heroines, and his ability to explore the tension between social convention and personal authenticity. Because literary obsessions rarely remain neatly confined to a single author, my interest in Forster eventually opened the door to other writers, other periods, and other literary movements, until I found myself reading Virginia Woolf, literary criticism, and modernist fiction despite the fact that nobody had ever assigned them to me.

The Helena Bonham Carter effect did not stop with Forster. Having discovered one literary adaptation through her work, I inevitably found myself watching The Wings of the Dove, which in turn introduced me to Henry James. Once again, I was not reading these books because they appeared on a reading list or because I felt some obligation to familiarise myself with the canon. I was reading them because a film had made me curious about the world from which it emerged.

The more honestly I map my reading life, the less it resembles a university syllabus and the more it resembles a conspiracy board connecting Helena Bonham Carter, Gothic fiction, Shakespeare, Edwardian novels, and a series of increasingly specific literary obsessions.

Emma Thompson occupies a similarly important place in this story, largely because she has played an absurdly significant role in my literary education despite having absolutely no idea who I am. Long before I encountered some of these authors in an academic context, I encountered them through her performances. There was Howards End, where she brought Margaret Schlegel to life with warmth, intelligence, and emotional depth. There was The Remains of the Day, a film so restrained that it somehow manages to break your heart through a glance, a missed opportunity, and an entire lifetime of things left unsaid. Then there was The Children Act, and it was Dame Em’s performance as Fiona Maye that introduced me to something that would remain with me long after the credits rolled: W. B. Yeats’s “Down by the Salley Gardens.”

Some poems arrive in your life and quietly settle there, becoming part of the furniture of your mind, that became one of them.

The line “she bid me take life easy” has followed me through stressful periods, difficult decisions, postgraduate study, and more than one existential crisis. Years later, it remains one of my favourite poems, and while the poem ultimately matters far more to me than the film that introduced me to it, I cannot ignore the role that adaptation played in that discovery.

Something similar happened with Frankenstein. Although my first encounter with Mary Shelley’s novel ended prematurely in a classroom full of giggling twelve-year-olds, I eventually returned to it after watching Kenneth Branagh’s adaptation, which regular readers will know we hold in particularly high regard here at Nonsense & Lit. Revisiting the novel later on allowed me to appreciate just how ambitious, emotional, and philosophically rich Shelley’s work really is, and I still find it amusing that a text I technically studied at school only truly revealed itself to me years later through film.

Even my interest in poetry owes something to adaptation. While watching Penny Dreadful, I repeatedly found myself encountering references to poets and literary traditions that seemed to carry significance beyond the immediate story, and curiosity once again did the rest. Before long I was reading Romantic poetry, tracing literary references, and discovering that some of the most rewarding reading experiences begin with a simple desire to understand what a writer, filmmaker, or actor is alluding to.

There is a tendency within some literary circles to treat adaptations as lesser versions of books, as though the proper route into literature must always begin with the original text. While I understand the reasoning behind that perspective, my own experience has taught me something rather different.

Without Helena Bonham Carter, I might never have discovered Forster when I did. Without Emma Thompson, Yeats may have entered my life much later. Without Kenneth Branagh, I might have continued associating Frankenstein primarily with an unfinished school assignment. Without Leonardo DiCaprio, Shakespeare may have remained a distant name in a textbook for much longer than he did. And without a childhood fascination with Dracula, I might never have developed the affection for Gothic literature that continues to shape my reading today.

When I look back at the path that eventually led me from a bilingual school in Mexico to postgraduate study in the United Kingdom, to literary criticism, and ultimately to running a blog devoted to books and language, I realise that film did far more than simply introduce me to a handful of authors. In many ways, it shaped the entire direction of my education.

English Literature was not offered at the university I most wanted to attend, so when the time came to choose a degree, after my brief period at psychology, I found myself gravitating towards Modern Languages and Linguistics instead. It seemed close enough to the world I wanted to inhabit, a field that would allow me to spend my days thinking about language, reading, and communication while keeping one foot in the literary world that had captivated me for years.

It would be easy to dismiss adaptations as secondary to the books from which they originate, but doing so would require me to ignore my own experience. Had it not been for film, I am not entirely convinced I would have become the reader I am today. More than that, I am not entirely convinced I would have followed the same educational path.

Film did not replace literature in my life. Rather, it served as the bridge that allowed me to reach it.