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Though I do believe that stories can evolve, I think that no matter what path that evolution takes we must always look back to the original story to have a fundamental understanding of the story.  A story-teller can tell the same story in 500 different ways, but I believe it is the first story that holds the most meaning, for it has not gone the any processes of modification…it has not yet evolved.  It is the original story too that will outlive the others ultimately (we do this in the biological world as well, searching for our most remote ancestors to learn something more about ourselves).  It is for this very reason that I believe that Forster’s story will last longer than Smith’s.  Though they are different stories, similar themes and characters are apparent within Smith’s story relating to Forster’s.  Her story has in fact evolved from Forster’s, so that the modern version of his story is apparent in her novel.  I think that years from now, readers will tend to look for the story-teller who produced the first story, rather than the second, because it is here in the second that the meaning of the story becomes altered and to some degree lost. Maybe literary adaptations are not useful at all in the long run, but only to contemporize a story that has already been told.