This is an update of George Bernard Shaw's "Pygmalion" that changes the genders of the main characters. Hannah Higgins attempts to turn blue-collar Boston beer vendor Elliot Doolittle into a viable candidate and inadvertently learns something of Elliot's side of life.

Set on an island off the coast of New England in the summer of 1965, Moonrise Kingdom tells the story of two twelve-year-olds who fall in love, make a secret pact, and run away together into the wilderness. As various authorities try to hunt them down, a violent storm is brewing off-shore – and the peaceful island community is turned upside down in more ways than anyone can handle.

Paul Harris works at a small research facility on the outskirts of Boston. After a weekend tryst with a co-worker leaves him wanting more, his unreciprocated desires gradually mold into an acute infatuation. When Danielle takes interest in a new scientist at the laboratory, Paul's suppressed resentments and perverse delusions finally become unhinged, triggering a horrific course of events that mercilessly engulf a tortured past and fugitive present.

Louisa May Alcott, author of "Little Women," leads a literary double life, writing under the pseudonym A.M. Barnard, an identity that remains until the 1940s.