Good news, everyone! Netflix and CBC have plans to turn Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace into a miniseries. The announcement comes just a few short months after we learned that Elisabeth Moss had signed on to star in a 10-episode Hulu adaptation of The Handmaid's Tale .
Atwood's 1996 novel, Alias Grace, centers on a real-life figure: Grace Marks, an Irish immigrant who, along with a fellow servant, was convicted of double murder in 1843. Three decades after the controversial ruling, Marks was exonerated. In the afterword to her novel, Atwood wrote:
The details were sensational: Grace Marks was uncommonly pretty and also extremely young; Kinnear's housekeeper, Nancy Montgomery, had previously given birth to an illegitimate child and was Thomas Kinnear's mistress; at her autopsy she was found to be pregnant. Grace and her fellow servant James McDermott had run away to the United States together and were assumed by the press to be lovers. The combination of sex, violence and the deplorable insubordination of the lower classes was most attractive to the journalists of the day.
Away from Her director Sarah Polley will write and produce the Alias Grace miniseries, alongside Halfire Entertainment. Deadline reports that "Polley ... originally adapted the book as a feature four years ago." American Psycho's Mary Harron will direct.
