Both Jane Campion's Portrait of a Lady (1996) and Mira Nair's Vanity Fair (2004) adapt canonical, male-authored novels of the nineteenth century in ways that address the power dynamic of the male gaze and that reposition the geographical framing of the source text. As such, they furnish examples of Julie Sanders's claim that infidelity to a source text enables ‘the most creative acts of adaptation’ (2006, 20) through their feminist lenses, forged away from the imperial metropole. Keeping in mind questions of the ‘politics of fidelity’ (Dicecco 2015, 170), however, Campion's and Nair's departures in their adaptations facilitate degrees of critique of these canonical narratives. Whereas Campion's film frames its source text self-reflexively as a bookend to the narrative presented by the novel, Nair's film, for its part, lends greater weight to colonised spaces and cultures and their interactions with the imperial centre. Both films also rethink their heroine's fate, diverging to various degrees from the narratives of these women's lives as originally conceived by male novelists. Further, both films position a male collector figure as a predator, the downfall of the films’ respective heroines, foregrounding the male gaze as ominous.

Campion and Nair made these films when their careers were already established, with their largest budgets to date (McHugh 2009, 140; Muir 2006, 218), enabling their work with high-profile international stars. As late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century films, The Portrait of a Lady and Vanity Fair's recreations of nineteenth-century society depart from, disrupt and de-familiarise the heritage genre in both narrative and visual terms. Ultimately, The Portrait of a Lady's greater self-reflexiveness announces more assertively its transfiguring relationship to the original text, privileging a gendered perspective, however, over one that engages meaningfully with race. Vanity Fair, in contrast, both supplements the novel where the representation of the non-Western Other is concerned and replicates some of its Orientalist assumptions in its more blurred stance on the nineteenth-century original and its own feminist intervention's reliance on exoticist consumption.