Novelist Susan Richards Shreve was busy last week preparing for her role as mother of the bride - Elizabeth, the elder of her two daughters - and was thinking about the bonds that unite the women of a family.
"I've had a lot of pictures copied of the women in our family for Elizabeth to have," she said. And she's turning a family heirloom into necklaces for both daughters: "I've had my mother's pearls divided."But she doesn't have an antique, silver-framed hand mirror to give them when times get tough as do the mothers in "A Will of Their Own," an NBC miniseries based on Shreve's 1992 novel "Daughters of the New World." ("Daughters" is being reissued under the title of the miniseries.)
Shreve said the mirror replaces the device she used in her book, a series of letters passed along through the years. The change doesn't bother her; she's mentioned mirrors in other novels. Anyway, she did not attempt to retain control over the TV production once she sold the rights, she said.
Shreve said she knew that executive producers David L. Wolper, Mark Wolper and Lynn Roth planned to use part but not all of her book, and that they and director Karen Arthur "would be giving the story a feminist approach."
Arthur first read Shreve's book (as did star Lea Thompson, she said) but worked from a script by Susan Nanus.
"There were a lot of things that I wish were in the movie that were in the book," she said. "It's a very dark book and I understand why a lot of it was left out."
NBC is touting "A Will of Their Own" as a generational story in the style of David Wolper's landmark miniseries "Roots" based on Alex Haley's book - in part, a pre-emptive strike: Haley's "Mama Flora's Family" airs on CBS next month.
NBC is also calling its two-night miniseries (tonight at 7 p.m.; Monday at 8 p.m. on Ch. 5) "a television event" marking the 150th anniversary year of a July 1848 meeting in Seneca Falls, N.Y., where goals were outlined for women's social and political equality and signed by 68 women and 32 men.
Filmed entirely in St. Louis, where, Arthur said, "we found an extraordinary reservoir of architectural looks," the miniseries uses about 6,000 actors, counting the extras. Faye Dunaway has a small but powerful appearance as birth-control champion Margaret Sanger, whose mother died at 48 after 18 pregnancies; Diana Scarwid is labor lawyer and suffragist Crystal Eastman; and Sonia Braga is migrant-worker union organizer Jessie Lopez de la Cruz, who visited the set during Braga's scene.
The story begins in 1894 as Maria Jermaine, daughter of an English schoolteacher, and her daughter Annie are aboard a ship headed for Washington, D.C., where they have agreed to work as housemaids at least five years for the Steward family.
"You come from a long line of fiery women," Maria tells Annie, played by Reiko Aylesworth. "In America, even a woman can make something of herself if she's got guts and determination."
"Guts and determination" proves to be an heirloom phrase that empowers their female descendants, some more fiery than others, but all of them self-confident, and achievement-oriented - particularly red-haired Amanda Steward, Annie's daughter and the character who carries the storyline.
Thompson ("Caroline in the City"), whose voice introduces and connects generational stories, plays Amanda from her teen years growing up with Chippewa Indians and lumberjack families in Wisconsin, to age 89.
Shreve said that feisty Amanda "is the kind of old woman I'd like to be." In her book, Shreve writes that Amanda would like her life to be "a moving picture, not a single narrative, but frame to frame, with many stories isolated from each other."
Amanda, motherless after Annie dies in childbirth with her second child, later is orphaned when her physician-father, William, dies of diphtheria.
"The whole book is formed by the loss of a mother at an early age," said Shreve, explaining that her grandmother died when Shreve's mother was only 8.
The "moving picture" of Amanda's life continues in Washington, where she goes to live with her grandparents. Her wealthy and socially prominent grandmother, Veronica Steward - who cast out William, her only son, when he proposed marriage to her maid Annie - begins the task of trying to turn her granddaughter into a lady.
Amanda, however, has plans of her own: The day after her social debut, at age 21, she leaves for New York City, hoping to become a photographer. There she meets James MacClaren, played by "Dharma & Greg's" Thomas Gibson, the man who is her life-long love, father of her daughter Sarah and eventually her husband.
Amanda's life is hard at times, and Veronica, played by Ellen Burstyn, will raise her great-granddaughter, Sarah. Only later, after Sarah's abusive and arrogant husband joins the McCarthy anti-communist witch hunt, which has targeted Amanda, does the genteel young woman realize she has enough of her mother's grit to leave him.
With the arrival of Sarah, played by Paris Jefferson, "A Will of Their Own" departs from Shreve's story. In Shreve's book, Sarah's daughter is Eleanor, who founds a school for ghetto children.
But screenwriter Nanus chose for Sarah's daughter the name she shares with Shreve, Susan. Played by Charlotte Ross, Susan is a rebellious teenager who accompanies her grandmother to a migrant workers' strike that turns violent. Appalled at their lack of medical care, she decides to become a physician, as was her grandfather, and founds a facility for abused women. By 1985, when the story concludes, Sarah has her own business, and Susan has three daughters and is expecting a fourth child.
In the 90 years covered in the story, much happened in the lives of American women. Some of those events - most notably those concerning voting and reproductive rights - are portrayed or mentioned, but each woman in the movie has her own interests and concerns.
So does Shreve, a mother of four who has turned out 11 novels, 24 children's books and three books of collections and is a professor of writing and English literature at George Mason University.
"My mother had been in her way . . . a very independent woman," said Shreve. "I was her only daughter; we were very close. When I wrote the book, my mother had died and my daughters were at an age where I had a perspective of a long journey. I wanted to do a kind of a tribute to women. One of the things I was interested in, in this book, is talking about time and the way lives are more fractured now than lives were at the turn of the century."
For that perspective, read the book.