Louisa May Alcott’s coming-of-age novel has never been out of print in the hundred and fifty years since its first publication in two parts in 1868-69. Generations of women have grown up and been inspired by the four March sisters Meg, Beth, Amy, and especially by the independent spirited and passionately ambitious Jo. Helen Keller was inspired by Jo March. So was Hilary Rodham Clinton. So was Simone de Beauvoir. And Danielle Steele, Gloria Steinem, Gertrude Stein, J.K. Rowling, Margaret Atwood, and, well, probably every aspiring woman writer of the past century and a half.
Yet Little Women does not appear on a lot of “100 Greatest Novels” lists, especially those enumerated by male critics. It is on the Guardian’s 2015 list of the “100 Best Novels Written in English” as well as the Observer’s similar list from 2003. But it is more likely to be named by readers choosing their own favorites. It was named in Penguin Books’ readers’ survey as one of their 100 favorite novels. It was ranked number 18 in the British public’s “Big Read” survey in 2003, and in a 2007 online poll conducted by the National Education Association it was listed as one of the “Teachers’ Top 100 Books for Children.” And again, in 2012, it ranked number 47 in a list of all-time best novels for children by the School Library Journal.
Perhaps this categorization of Little Women as a children’s or YA book has, as in the case of Watership Down, influenced critics to regard it less highly. It may also have suffered by being thought of as a book for girls. Indeed, although the novel was often taught in schools in the past, that practice has been largely discontinued in recent decades because “boys won’t be interested in it.” I need hardly point out that no boy’s book has ever been left out of a school curriculum because “girls won’t be interested in it.” It seems to me that if boys plan to have a wife or female partner at any time in the future, or could someday have a daughter, it may be a good idea for them to know how girls might feel about things. The importance of literature lies in large part in its power to develop empathy in its readers. And that’s one reason this book belongs on my “100 Most Lovable Novels in the English Language.”
For myself, I must admit that I had not actually read Little Women until about a year ago, as a part of my quest to read all the best English language novels of all time. Why did I need to read Little Women, I had thought, when I had seen all four of the major film versions of the novel, plus a couple of television dramatizations as well as a not terribly successful Broadway musical of the same story? Could I ever forget George Cukor’s depression-era film and Katharine Hepburn’s gold standard Jo? Or the star-studded 1949 technicolor version that starred June Allyson as Jo and Peter Lawford as Laurie, with Margaret O’Brien as Beth, Elizabeth Taylor in her last ingenue role as Amy, and pre-Psycho-shower Janet Leigh as Meg. Or the wonderful 1994 version, with Best Actress-nominated Winona Ryder as Jo, Kirsten Dunst as Amy, and young Claire Danes as the doomed Beth.
But it was not until I actually read the book that I realized how great an adaptation was the 2019 film by Barbie director Greta Gerwig. In that post-modern, meta-narrative, depicting Jo March writing the novel of her life (essentially fictionalizing Alcott’s own experience), Gerwig has her Jo (Saoirse Ronan), like Alcott herself, reluctantly take on the task of writing the “novel for girls” recommended by her publisher, and chafing under her readers’ demands that her heroine end up getting married (Alcott’s original plan was to keep Jo single and free at the novel’s end), and then messing with everyone’s head by having Jo marry the professor in the end. Gerwig’s is also the first film version of the story that gives a truly sympathetic portrayal of the younger sister Amy, played by Florence Pugh in a performance that should have earned her an Oscar (not just the nomination she got). Amy has always come across mostly as a self-centered and jealous little brat who ends up with Jo’s boyfriend in the end. But in this film, the Amy of the novel comes across as a fully rounded character with artistic ambitions like those of her older sister.
Little Women was for its time a radically different “girls’ book” worthy of a writer who was the daughter of transcendentalist Bronson Alcott and spent her formative years among the likes of Emerson and Thoreau, with occasional visits from Hawthorne and Longfellow. What made it so different was its insistence that girls did not have to devote all their energies to attract a man. That women could be independent and self-sufficient. The gender roles were learned, social constructs, and not inborn. And later, when Jo marries, the novel portrays what Alcott called a “democratic marriage,” in which both parties contribute equally, the only basis for happiness in marriage, Alcott would have insisted.
But the novel is entitled Little Women, not The Jo March Story. Alcott creates four distinct sisters (based on herself and her own family), each with her own desires. It has been pointed out that Meg is beautiful and dreams of being rich but falls in love with and marries a poor man. Beth is shy and wants to grow old in her parents’ home, but dies an early and tragic death. Amy longs to be an accomplished artist but abandons her goals to marry Laurie. And Jo, much to her readers’ chagrin, gives up her writing career when she marries her professor. In his Pulitzer-Prize winning biography Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father, John Matteson insightfully observes that Little Women’s “enduring power is that not one of the March sisters gets what she once believed would make her happy.”
And isn’t that just true to life? It’s only one aspect of the novel that moved G.K. Chesterton to claim that in the novel Alcott “anticipated realism [in fiction] by twenty or thirty years.” In this way, too, the novel was an innovation. So my advice to you is this: Read the actual novel, and don’t assume because of its familiarity that you know all there is to know about it. And once you’ve read it, take a look (or another look) at Gerwig’s film version, a real aesthetic achievement in its own right.