Director Sarah Polley paired up with Little Women adaptation

Sarah Polley, the Canadian actor and director known for Oscar-nominated drama Away from Her and the acclaimed documentary Stories We Tell, looks set to take charge of a new adaptation of the classic novel Little Women, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

Polley, one of Hollywood’s most celebrated young female film-makers, is in talks with Sony to adapt Louisa May Alcott’s 19th-century novel for studio Sony. It is not clear at this stage whether she will take the director’s chair as well as writing the screenplay.

Alcott’s semi-autobiographical book centres on four sisters, Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy March, growing up in “genteel poverty” in New England. The characters and storylines were heavily influenced by the author’s own experiences of reaching maturity in a family of four sisters. Alcott reputedly wrote the novel for the money and is said to have thought the first few chapters dull when she handed them into her publisher, but the book was an instant success and is considered a classic of American literature. Despite its focus on female domesticity, the novel has won praise from some feminist critics for its realistic depiction of the lives of adolescent girls and stubborn refusal to echo the moralising traditions of the period. Alcott herself was an advocate of women’s suffrage.

Little Women has been filmed four times by Hollywood for the big screen. The best known are Mervyn LeRoy’s 1949 adaptation, which was one of that year’s biggest US box office hits, and Gillian Armstrong’s 1994 version, which starred Winona Ryder, Kirsten Dunst, Claire Danes and Susan Sarandon. The latter was nominated for three Oscars and remains highly praised by critics.

The new version of Little Women is being put together by Sony’s Amy Pascal, the former studio chief who recently stepped down to run her own production unit at Sony in the wake of last year’s hacking scandal. The studio previously planned a new adaptation of Alcott’s novel in 2013.