Louisa May Alcott’s 19th century classic has never been more modern. Saoirse Ronan, Emma Watson, Florence Pugh and Eliza Scanlen play the March sisters in Greta Gerwig’s personal, heart-warming adaptation of Alcott’s beloved story.

 

Louisa May Alcott was a feminist and an abolitionist. She advocated for women’s rights, supported the suffragette movement, was the first woman to register to vote in Concord, Massachusetts (1879, well before the 19th amendment) and even served as station master on the Underground Railroad, the network designed to help enslaved African-Americans to escape into free states. After years of writing and struggling to support her family with their financial difficulties, she eventually built a fortune on the Little Women books. She never married.

It is no surprise that Alcott wrote such a secretly subversive, inventive novel. And yet, the modernity of Little Women had always been hidden behind its‘domesticity’. Until now. Relying on Alcott’s letters and life, Gerwig’s film becomes also the story of Alcottherself, who finally gets the ending her heroine had been denied by her publisher and readers, who wanted her to be married by the end of the book.  

The film begins with bright and ambitious Jo (SaoirseRonan) selling a story to a publisher in New York. In an interview, Gerwig talks about choosing this scene because of how personal it is for her: “I know exactly what that is – to sit in front of somebody and try to sell them a story, and they’re telling me I need to make changes and I’m figuring out how many changes I can make and still live with myself – But I need the money!” Jo wants to be a writer but is constantly pressured into marriage in order to help improve her family’s fortunes. As for the other sisters, Amy is in Paris with Laurie (Timothée Chalamet) and Aunt March (Meryl Streep),Meg (Emma Watson) is living with her penniless husband, while Beth (Eliza Scanlen) is sick at home,waiting to meet her tragic fate. While the novel and the other film adaptations tell the story chronologically, Gerwig splits it into two timelines, with constant flashbacks of late childhood woven into the lives of the sisters as young women.

 

Between present and past, the characters quickly take on more dimensions, as they grow and fight in a world thatwants them as clichés: “If I were a girl in a book, this would all be so easy, I’d give up the world happily,”Jo says. Jo’s willful and stubborn personality, together with her fiery and passionate temper, make her a wonderfully complex character, one that is not afraid to speak her mind or show her weaknesses. Meg’s strength, on the other hand, lies in her decision to marry the man she loves, even though it means adjusting to a life where she cannot afford much. Beth is portrayed as shy and generous – she contracts the fever that eventually kills her while helping a poor family – while also being an artist in her own right. Finally Amy (beautifully playedby star-in-the-making Florence Pugh, nominated for her first Oscar for this role), long viewed as the spoiltyounger sister, becomes an elegant and resolute young woman with some of the best lines in the film –“I want to be great or nothing,” she tells Laurie when he asks her about her painting. Through Gerwig’s lenses, Alcott’s characters are intelligent, creative women who constantly question the social mores that trample and undervaluethem: “I’m sick of being told that love is all a woman is fit for,” Jo claims. “But I’m so lonely.”

In this version of the story, Amy and Jo, with their brightness, creativity and impetuosity, are mirrors. Their rivalry, which reaches its peak in childhood when Amy burns Jo’s novel, returns in adulthood with Laurie, who is rejected by Jo and eventually falls in love with Amy. Even though Amy has always loved him, she struggles to accept his proposal. “I’ve been second to Jo my whole life,” she says bitterly.  

Writer Jia Tolentino claims that ‘traditionally, male literary characters are written and received as emblems of the human condition rather than the male one […] Female literary characters, in contrast, indicate the condition of being a woman. They are condemned to a universe that revolves around sex and family and domesticity.” Gerwig instead manages to make her heroines emblematic of the human condition, whileparadoxically keeping them in a world that revolves around home and family. In doing so, Little Womenreminds us that all stories are worth being told.

The film is a call to find your own voice and tell yourown story. When Jo is sceptical that anyone will read her book because of its ‘domestic’ struggles, Amy points out that “writing things is what makes them important.”