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Our conceptions of a past we have not experienced are greatly reliant on the images produced of it on screen. Historical films, documentaries, and literary adaptations contribute to forming our notions of what a bygone era was like. All the major films produced in the past decade that depict the eighteenth century share a remarkable set of similarities. First, all the films tell the life stories of women. What is more, the subjects of the films are all noblewomen whose lives share notable resemblances which are told in strikingly similar ways. Second, they are all biographical films, or biopics, rather than purely fictional accounts. Finally, these biopics are all also openly acknowledged adaptations of biographical texts. Changes in the representation of the subject matter are inevitable in any book-toscreen adaptation, but the changes made in these cases are also markedly similar and appear to affect a noticeable shift in how eighteenth-century womanhood is presented to a modern audience. In what follows, three major biopics will be analysed: The Duchess (2009), A Royal Affair (2012), and The Scandalous Lady W (2015).1 These films all represent the lives of eighteenth-century British women: Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire (1757–1806), Caroline Matilda of Great Britain, later Queen Caroline Mathilde of Denmark and Norway (1751–1775), and Lady Worsley, Seymour Dorothy Fleming (1758–1818). The main focus of the analysis will lie in the biopics’ relationship with their acknowledged source texts: Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire (1999), Prinsesse af Blodet: En Roman om Caroline Mathilde (2000), and The Scandalous Lady W: An Eighteenth-Century Tale of Sex, Scandal and Divorce (2008).2 Particular emphasis will be placed on the thematic consequences of the creative strategies of adaptation – selection, (re)arrangement, omission, addition, marginalization, expansion, and alteration – that have been deployed as their stories have been transposed from biographical texts into biographical films.3 The effect that changes in the content may have on today’s cultural memory of the eighteenth From Biographical Text to Biopic: Adapting the Cultural Memory of the Eighteenth Century Eli Løfaldli