Actress Jessica Chastain was signed on to develop The Honeymoon into a feature film. Variety reports that Chastain’s production company Freckle Films will produce the film will be based on Dinitia Smith’s 2016 historical drama The Honeymoon: A Novel of George Eliot.
The book recounts Eliot’s honeymoon in Venice in June 1880, after her marriage to a much younger man named John Walter Cross. Still recovering from the death of her longtime companion George Henry Lewes, she ponders questions about the decline of not only her physical appearance but the larger prospect of the loneliness that she feared awaited her.
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George Eliot was the pen name for Mary Ann Evans, which she used so that her work would be taken seriously in a time when female authors were relegated to lighthearted romance novels. Eventually, she became one of the most famous novelists of the era as the author of Silas Marner, Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, and Romola. Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life, is widely regarded as the author’s greatest work.
The Oscar-nominated Chastain first launched Freckle Films in 2016. She was an executive producer on The Zookeeper’s Wife, and a producer on the completed assassination drama Eve, with Tate Taylor (The Help, Girl on the Train) directing. She’ll also star in IT: Chapter Two, which is out in theaters this summer.
