First Romance

This week’s CBS Sunday movie is based on a hot new novel by one of America’s best-loved authors. The writer only happens to have been dead for 109 years.

Louisa May Alcott’s “The Inheritance,” which was published on Valentine’s Day by Dutton, was written in 1849 by Alcott, then 17. The author of such beloved classics as “Little Women” and “Little Men” never published the slight, charming tale of a former orphan who discovers love and her birthright while serving as a companion in an aristocratic family.

The lush CBS adaptation, which can best be described as “National Velvet” meets “Cinderella,” stars Meredith Baxter, Tom Conti, Thomas Gibson and Cari Shayne as the plucky heroine Edith.

Alcott’s handwritten manuscript of “The Inheritance,” believed to be her first novel, was “discovered” in 1988 at Harvard University’s Houghton Library. Joel Myerson, the Carolina Distinguished Professor of American Literature at the University of South Carolina, and Daniel Shealy, an English professor at the University of North Carolina, made the find while they were doing research for a book they were editing, “The Selected Letters of Louisa May Alcott.”

“As part of our research, we looked at every single thing of hers at Harvard,” Myerson says. “In the course of calling up every single thing to our desks, the manuscript to ‘The Inheritance’ appeared.”

The manuscript had been donated along with many other uncataloged materials to Harvard in 1974 by Alcott’s heirs. “We were the first people, in a sense, to realize what it really was,” Myerson says. But he delayed doing anything about it for several years because he and Shealy were working on editions of Alcott’s journals and short fiction.

Finally, Myerson said, “We caught our breath and looked around and realized that we hadn’t done anything with this wonderful manuscript we had found.”

The paper the manuscript was written on, he says, was in wonderful shape, as was the binding. But Alcott’s penmanship and spelling were another matter. “Even in later life, she had chronic trouble misspelling certain types of words with’ei’ and ‘ie.’ Of course, that was present in this as well. Plus in a sense it was a working manuscript. There were a lot of cross-cuts, and revisions and things inserted in the margins. We had to transcribe those and put them in the correct place.”

“The Inheritance,” Myerson says, demonstrates Alcott’s tremendous ability, even at a young age, to “do a good plot.” Also in evidence, he says, are the central themes that run through her later works: honesty, fidelity and self-sacrifice.

“Where this differs from her later works in one respect is that, at age 17, she is still borrowing from established literary types like the Gothic romance,” Myerson says. “Whereas, by the time she’s writing ‘Little Women,’ she’s striking out on her own and really doing the type of autobiographical writing she’s best at.”

Myerson believes Alcott shied away from having the work published because, “in the 1850s, she primarily wrote short fiction, and this was a little bit too long and probably not suitable for the types of magazines she was writing for. There’s also a sense that she didn’t feel confident with this being such an early piece of her writing.”

Alcott’s popularity has gone through a major resurgence with the success of the 1994 film version of “Little Women” and the publication that year of another previously undiscovered novel, “The Long Fatal Love Chase.”

There was a heated bidding war for the screen rights to “The Inheritance,” which went to Cosgrove-Muerer Productions and TeleVest.

“We really had to jump into the bidding,” says executive producer Terry Dunn Meurer. “We heard about it on a Tuesday and the auction was starting at 9 on the next day. It was very last-minute.”

Meurer says they were eager to obtain the project because it was Alcott’s first novel. “It’s special,” she says. “She went on to do such wonderful work.”

Adapting the old-fashioned romance for television was a bit of a challenge for screenwriter Maria Nation because of its drawing room setting and the lack of action.

“The things that happen aren’t that interesting as far as a screenplay,” Nation explains. “I had to find a way to externalize what is going on and set up, in a way, who this character is so that we can see it and feel it.”

Edith, says Nation, is so kind and uncomplaining in the novel that she needed to be fleshed out for the movie. “The other task was setting up stronger, dramatic dynamics that weren’t [in the book]. I think Louisa May Alcott didn’t want to write anybody that bad.”

There were also certain story points that just appeared out of the blue. “There was big plot device in her book where a mysterious stranger just happens to find her and delivers incredibly crucial information,” Nation says. In the movie, the family’s understanding father, Mr. Hamilton (Conti), delivers the information to Edith.

The setting of the story was moved from England to Concord, Mass., where Alcott lived, and an exciting horse race involving Edith was added. “There were horses in the book, but we built up on that quite a bit,” Nation says. “The sponsor, Kraft, wanted a horse race in it. So I put in the horse race and made it affect the plot.”

“The book is more about class and this is less about class,” Meurer adds. “It’s a very sweet and innocent story. We have made some changes, but we feel like they are for the better. We are hoping that Louisa will be pleased with what we’ve done. “

“The Inheritance” airs Sunday at 9 p.m. on CBS.