British playwright Alice Birch is writing the television adaptation of Mary Gabriel’s 2011 bestseller “Love and Capital,” Screen Daily reports.

James Schamus’ Symbolic Exchange is partnering with Germany’s X-Filme, France’s Haut et Court, and the UK’s Potboiler to produce the TV series, which views the lives of revolutionary socialists Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels through women. The biography was a National Book Award finalist, a National Book Critics Circle finalist, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Birch is an award-winning playwright whose works include “Revolt,” “Ophelia’s Zimmer,” “We Want You To Watch,” “So Much Once,” and “Open Court Soap Opera.” She made her screen debut with the screenplay for “Lady Macbeth,” which hit festivals this fall, and was adapted from Nikolai Leskov’s 1865 novel “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District.”

“When James first started talking to me about the material, I thought I knew this story,” Birch said. “I thought I knew about Marx and Engels, about their politics, their ideas and their lives. But from the very first page, I realized I knew nothing about these men and their extraordinary families — and crucially, I knew nothing about the incredible women who have sat behind them for so long. It’s a story that’s rich with complexity and ripe for sharing with a broad audience. It also feels like there’s nothing more apposite for our particular times than this story.”

Marx and Engels family lives, the team says, “were lived at a fever pitch, well-suited to the possibilities of the most dramatic television imaginable. Illicit affairs, revolutionary plots, murder-suicide pacts, midnight escapes, aristocratic luxury, and Dickensian poverty — the true story of the Marx dynasty outdoes even the most fanciful of today’s invented soap operas, all against the background of a world on fire and the formation of ideas that still transform today’s global society.”

“By allowing us to experience this extraordinary story through the eyes primarily of the women who lived it, Mary Gabriel allows us for the first time to feel the entire human drama that changed our world,” commented Schamus. “This is event television, and a perfect topic for large-scale European co-production with partners of tremendous distinction and taste. To have a bold visionary like Alice Birch leading the initial creative charge makes this all the more exciting.”

The series will be developed and produced in Europe. No word yet on a network.