This is an unusual choice, as Anne Boyd Rioux pointed out in last year’s incisive Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters, eschewing as it does the calmer, more “innocent” state of childhood. When the first book opens they range in age from 11 or so (Amy) to 16 (Meg), and thus are on the brink of womanhood. The girls work as governesses and lady’s companions they mend old clothes to make them last they make their own entertainment: plays, newspapers, books, music. It has never been a secret that Jo is a version of Alcott, who 'never liked girls or knew many, except my sisters' It tells a rather different story depending on whether you read it in the US or in the UK, where the second half is generally hived off as Little Women Wedded, or Good Wives, and often not read at all. They used to be well off, but he was too trusting with his money, and now they are poor the famed first lines – “‘Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents,’ grumbled Jo, lying on the rug” – establish how they feel about it, and some of the ways in which they will be tested. Published in the late 1860s, Little Women, for those for whom mentions of Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy do not instantly evoke scenes known since childhood (a book-burning, the shearing of a head of long hair), tells the story of four girls whose father is away, working as a chaplain in the US civil war.
The parallels between Jo and her creator, Alcott, are also drawn out by Gerwig, and this adult Jo co-exists throughout the film with the child Jo, who is learning how to write, how to be a woman and, often, how similar these processes can be. Along with all the things we expect from this story (coming of age, sibling relations, the challenge of being good), the film is about the relationship of fiction with life, and the challenges and the rewards of writing as a job. Almost all the others have begun with the girls’ childhood, but in Gerwig’s film, we first meet an adult Jo March in the New York offices of the Weekly Volcano, where she hopes to place a story – thus setting it up as a film about writing. G reta Gerwig’s new big-screen adaptation of Little Women, the sixth about the March sisters to be made so far, starts with a scene taken from the middle of Louisa May Alcott’s second volume.