Adaptation pages collect every major screen version of a novel in one place: the year, the director, the cast and the running time, with the book’s own reading time alongside. Thirteen novels are covered so far, from Jane Austen and the Brontës to Dickens, Stevenson, Dumas and Alcott.
The point of the comparison is density. A novel of 122,000 words takes about seven hours to read; a two-hour film spends roughly a quarter of that time on the same story. Seeing the numbers together shows which adaptations keep the book’s pace and which condense it, without any judgement about which is better viewing.
Filmed classics, side by side
13 novels with 56 screen versions between them. Each page lists every version with director, cast and running time, and compares the screen times with the reading time of the book.
| Book | Author | Versions | Years |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pride and Prejudice | Jane Austen (1813) | 4 | 1940–2005 |
| Jane Eyre | Charlotte Brontë (1847) | 6 | 1943–2011 |
| Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus | Mary Shelley (1818) | 4 | 1931–1994 |
| Dracula | Bram Stoker (1897) | 4 | 1931–1992 |
| Great Expectations | Charles Dickens (1861) | 4 | 1946–2012 |
| A Christmas Carol | Charles Dickens (1843) | 5 | 1938–2009 |
| Treasure Island | Robert Louis Stevenson (1883) | 5 | 1934–1999 |
| The Hound of the Baskervilles | Arthur Conan Doyle (1902) | 4 | 1939–2002 |
| Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland | Lewis Carroll (1865) | 5 | 1951–2010 |
| Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde | Robert Louis Stevenson (1886) | 4 | 1920–1968 |
| The Count of Monte Cristo | Alexandre Dumas (1844) | 3 | 1934–2002 |
| Oliver Twist | Charles Dickens (1838) | 4 | 1948–2005 |
| Little Women | Louisa May Alcott (1868) | 4 | 1933–2019 |
How these pages are built
Every record follows the same rule: the year, director, cast and runtime come from the Wikipedia article for that specific film, and each one is checked against its IMDb entry for the same year. Where the two disagree, Wikipedia’s article is the source and the discrepancy is recorded in the data file rather than smoothed over.
Reading times use 300 words a minute, the same pace the rest of the site applies to its books. Running times are the length of each version as released, not of any director’s cut or restored edition, so a longer cut may exist without appearing here.
Questions readers ask
How are these adaptation pages made?
Each one is generated from a data file holding the year, director, cast, runtime and IMDb id of every version, together with the novel’s word count from its page on this site. Numbers on the page are checked against that file at build time.
Why are some adaptations missing?
Only versions with a Wikipedia article and a matching IMDb entry are included, and a novel needs at least three of them to get a page. Short films, radio plays and adaptations that change the setting completely are out of scope.
Where do the books come from?
Every novel listed here is available as a free EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB edition on editions.ink, with no account and no payment.
Every book linked from this page is a free ebook on editions.ink: EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB, no account needed. Start from classic fiction or the author index.