In Greta Gerwig´s new film of Little Women, the March girls wrestle with sexual politics and creative fulfilment. How true is it to Louisa May Alcott´s vision?Greta 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. 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. 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. 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.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. 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. 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. Continue reading...
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