Sony Pictures working on "Little Women" classic novel adaptation

PanARMENIAN.Net - Sony Pictures will adapt the classic novel Little Women, Digital Spy said.

The studio has enlisted newcomer Olivia Milch to write the script.

Louisa May Alcott's Little Women explores the lives of the four March sisters as the Civil War plays out in the backdrop, Variety reports.

Denise Di Novi (Crazy Stupid Love) and Robin Swicord (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) have been tapped to produce the feature.

Sony's last effort with the classic tale was released in 1994 from director Gillian Armstrong (Oscar and Lucinda).

The film starred Susan Sarandon (Bull Durham), Winona Ryder (Heathers), Kirsten Dunst and a very young Christian Bale.

Little Women is a novel by American author Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888). The book was written in between 1868 and 1869 in Concord, Massachusetts and Boston, at the request of Alcott's publisher. As setting for the novel, the author chose Orchard House, where she had penned it. It was published in two volumes in 1868 and 1869. The novel follows the lives of four sisters – Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy March – detailing their passage from childhood to womanhood, and is loosely based on the author and her three sisters. The first volume, Little Women, was an immediate commercial and critical success, prompting the composition of the book's second volume, entitled Good Wives, which was also successful. Both books were first published as a single volume entitled Little Women in 1880. Alcott followed Little Women with two sequels, also featuring the March sisters: Little Men (1871) and Jo's Boys (1886). Little Women was a fiction novel for girls that veered from the normal writings for children, especially girls, at the time. The novel has three major themes:” domesticity, work, and true love. All of them are interdependent and each is necessary to the achievement of a heroine’s individual identity.”

Little Women itself “has been read as a romance or as a quest, or both. It has been read as a family drama that validates virtue over wealth.” Little Women has been read “as a means of escaping that life by women who knew its gender constraints only too well.” Alcott “combines many conventions of the sentimental novel with crucial ingredients of Romantic children’s fiction, creating a new form of which Little Women is a unique model.” Elbert argued that within Little Women can be found the first vision of the “American Girl” and that her multiple aspects are embodied in the differing March sisters.