It is doubtful whether any novel has been more important to America’s female writers than Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women,” the story of the four March sisters living in genteel poverty in Massachusetts in the eighteen-sixties. The eldest is Meg, beautiful, maternal, and mild. She is sixteen when the book opens. Then comes Meg’s opposite, fifteen-year-old Jo: bookish and boyish, loud and wild. Jo writes plays that the girls perform, with false mustaches and paper swords, in the parlor. Next comes Beth, thirteen: recessive, unswervingly kind, and doomed to die young. She collects cast-off dolls—dolls with no arms, dolls with their stuffing coming out—and nurses them in her doll hospital. Finally, there is Amy, who is vain and selfish but, at twelve, also the baby of the family, and cute, so everybody loves her anyway. The girls’ father is away from home, serving as a chaplain in the Civil War. Their mother, whom they call Marmee, is with them, and the girls are always nuzzling up to her chair in order to draw on her bottomless fund of loving counsel. Next door live a rich old man and his orphaned grandson, Laurie, who, when he is home from his Swiss boarding school, lurks behind the curtains to get a look at what the March sisters are up to. Jo catches him spying on them, and befriends him. He soon falls in love with her.
These characters are not glamorous, and the events are mostly not of great moment. We witness one death, and it is a solemn matter, but otherwise the book is pretty much a business of how the cat had kittens and somebody went skating and fell through the ice. Yet “Little Women,” published in 1868-69, was a smash hit. Its first part, in an initial printing of two thousand copies, sold out in two weeks. Then, while the publisher rushed to produce more copies of that, he gave Alcott the go-ahead to write a second, concluding part. It, too, was promptly grabbed up. Since then, “Little Women” has never been out of print. Unsurprisingly, it has been most popular with women. “I read ‘Little Women’ a thousand times,” Cynthia Ozick has written. Many others have recorded how much the book meant to them: Nora and Delia Ephron, Barbara Kingsolver, Jane Smiley, Anne Tyler, Mary Gordon, Jhumpa Lahiri, Stephenie Meyer. As this list shows, the influence travels from the highbrow to the middlebrow to the lowbrow. And it extends far beyond our shores. Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, and A.S. Byatt have all paid tribute.
The book’s fans didn’t merely like it; it gave them a life, they said. Simone de Beauvoir, as a child, used to make up “Little Women” games that she played with her sister. Beauvoir always took the role of Jo. “I was able to tell myself that I too was like her,” she recalled. “I too would be superior and find my place.” Susan Sontag, in an interview, said she would never have become a writer without the example of Jo March. Ursula Le Guin said that Alcott’s Jo, “as close as a sister and as common as grass,” made writing seem like something even a girl could do. Writers also used “Little Women” to turn their characters into writers. In Elena Ferrante’s “My Brilliant Friend,” the two child heroines have a shared copy of “Little Women” that finally crumbles from overuse. One becomes a famous writer, inspired, in part, by the other’s childhood writing.
Long before she wrote “Little Women,” Alcott (1832-88) swore never to marry, a decision that was no doubt rooted in her observations of her parents’ union. Her father, Bronson Alcott (1795-1888), was an intellectual, or, in any case, a man who had thoughts, a member of New England’s Transcendental Club and a friend of its other members—Emerson, Thoreau. Bronson saw himself as a philosopher, but he is remembered primarily as a pioneer of “progressive education.” He believed in self-expression and fresh air rather than times tables. But the schools and communities that he established quickly failed. His most famous project was Fruitlands, a utopian community that he founded with a friend in the town of Harvard, Massachusetts, in 1843. This was to be a new Eden, one that eschewed the sins that got humankind kicked out of the old one. The communards would till the soil without exploiting animal labor. Needless to say, they ate no animals, but they were vegetarians of a special kind: they ate only vegetables that grew upward, never those, like potatoes, which grew downward. They had no contact with alcohol, or even with milk. (It belonged to the cows.) They took only cold baths, never warm.
Understandably, people did not line up to join Fruitlands. The community folded after seven months. And that stands as a symbol for most of Bronson Alcott’s projects. His ideas were interesting as ideas, but, in action, they came to little. Nor did he have any luck translating them into writing. Even his loyal friend Emerson said that when Bronson tried to put his ideas into words he became helpless. And so Bronson, when he was still in his forties, basically gave up trying to make a living. “I have as yet no clear call to any work beyond myself,” as he put it. Now and then, he staged a Socratic “conversation,” or question-and-answer session, with an audience, and occasionally he was paid for this, but for the most part his household, consisting of his energetic wife, Abba, and his four daughters, the models for the March girls, had to fend for themselves. Sometimes—did he notice?—they were grievously poor, resorting to bread and water for dinner and accepting charity from relatives and friends. (Emerson was a steady donor.) By the time Louisa, the second-oldest girl, was in her mid-twenties, the family had moved more than thirty times. Eventually, Louisa decided that she might be able to help by writing stories for the popular press, and she soon discovered that the stories that sold most easily were thrillers. Only in 1950, when an enterprising scholar, MadeleineB. Stern, published the first comprehensive biography of Alcott, did the world discover that the author of “Little Women,” with its kittens and muffins, had once made a living producing “Pauline’s Passion and Punishment,” “The Abbot’s Ghost or Maurice Treherne’s Temptation,” and similar material, under a pen name, for various weeklies.
Soon, however, a publisher, Thomas Niles, sensed something about Louisa. Or maybe he just saw a market opportunity. If there were tales written specifically for boys—adventure tales—why shouldn’t there also be stories about girls’ concerns, written for them? Girls liked reading more than boys did. (This is still true.) So Niles suggested to Louisa that she write a “girls’ story.” She thought this was a stupid idea. “Never liked girls, or knew many, except my sisters,” she wrote in her journal. But her family was terribly strapped, so what she did was write a novel about the few girls she knew, her sisters, and her life with them.
You can get the whole story from a new book, “Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of ‘Little Women’ and Why It Still Matters” (Norton), by Anne Boyd Rioux, an English professor at the University of New Orleans. This is a sort of collection of “Little Women” topics: the circumstances that brought Louisa to write the book and the difficult family on which the loving March family is based. It describes the book’s thunderous success: its hundred-and-more editions, its translation into fifty-odd languages (reportedly, it is still the second most popular book among Japanese girls), its sequels, its spinoffs—the Hallmark cards, the Madame Alexander dolls—and, above all, its fabulous sales. Rioux can’t give us a firm count, because in the early days the book was extensively pirated, and then it went into the public domain, but she estimates that ten million copies have been sold, and that’s not including abridged editions. Perhaps worried about how a “girls’ story” would fare in the marketplace, the publisher persuaded Alcott to take a royalty, of 6.6 per cent, rather than a flat fee, which she might well have preferred. In consequence, the book and its sequels supported her and her relatives, plus some of her relatives’ relatives, for the rest of their lives.
Rioux goes on from the book to the plays and the movies. The first “Little Women” play opened in New York, in 1912, and was a hit. It was soon followed by two silent movies, in 1917 and 1918. (Both are lost.) Then came the talkies, starting with George Cukor’s 1933 version, which cast Katharine Hepburn, hitherto mainly a stage actress, as Jo and helped make her a movie star. Between 1935 and 1950, there were forty-eight radio dramatizations. Toward the end of that run came a second famous movie, Mervyn LeRoy’s 1949 version, with June Allyson as Jo, Elizabeth Taylor as Amy, Janet Leigh as Meg, and Margaret O’Brien as Beth. In the past few decades, the most important version has been Gillian Armstrong’s 1994 film, with Winona Ryder as Jo, Kirsten Dunst as Amy, and, as Marmee, Susan Sarandon, who had been enshrined as a feminist icon by “Thelma and Louise.” Recently, it was announced that Greta Gerwig, who had such success last year with “Lady Bird,” her directorial début, is at work on a new “Little Women” movie, with Saoirse Ronan, the star of “Lady Bird,” in the lead role. Ronan seems made to be Jo. And those are just the big-screen versions. By the time Rioux’s book went to press, there had been twelve adaptations for American television, and plenty more elsewhere. In 1987, there was a forty-eight-episode anime version in Japan.
The chapter on the adaptations is a lot of fun. First, it teaches you the problems that face filmmakers adapting famous novels. In “Little Women” movies, the actors are almost always too old, because the directors need experienced people to play these interesting youngsters. June Allyson was thirty-one when she played the fifteen-year-old Jo. Then, partly because the actors are worried that they are too old, they accentuate everything to death. In the Cukor “Little Women,” Katharine Hepburn sometimes looks as though she were going to jump off the screen and sock you in the face, so eager is she to convince you that she is a tomboy. Amy’s vanity is almost always overdone, never more so than by the teen actress Elizabeth Taylor, with a set of blond ringlets that look like a brace of kielbasas. Poor, sickly Beth is almost always sentimentalized; Marmee is often a bore. Whole hunks of the plot may be left out, because this is a twenty-seven-chapter book being squeezed into what is usually a movie of two to three hours.
Rioux apparently finished her book before she could see the most recent entry, a three-hour BBC miniseries directed by a newcomer, Vanessa Caswill. This version’s Jo—Maya Hawke, who had had little acting experience but was blessed with good genes (her parents are Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke)—manages to be Jo-like without being unsexy. Most moving, because the roles are so hard to play, are two other characters. Annes Elwy’s freckle-faced Beth seems to carry her death within her, like an unborn child, from the moment we see her. The movie’s other great standout is Emily Watson, whose features have sometimes seemed too childlike for the roles she has played. Here, as Marmee, she is perfect, both a girl and a mother, her waist a little thicker, her face redder, than what we saw in “Breaking the Waves,” in which, at twenty-eight, she became a star. Caswill can’t take her eyes off her, and she gives her an amazing scene that is not in the book. When one of her daughters gives birth—to twins—Marmee is the midwife. At the end of the ordeal, you can read in Watson’s sweaty, exhausted face everything that Alcott hinted at but did not say about how her own mother was left to do everything. Another of Caswill’s additions is a series of dazzling scenes from nature—light-dappled rivers, fat, furry bees circling pink flowers—that could turn you into a Transcendentalist.
Alcott never swerved in her decision not to marry. “I’d rather be a free spinster and paddle my own canoe,” as she put it. And yet she concluded the first volume of “Little Women” with a betrothal. Meg is proposed to by Laurie’s tutor, John Brook, a good man, and she accepts. Jo, who takes the same position as her creator on the subject of marriage—never!—is scandalized. How could Meg have done such a stupid and heartless thing, and created a breach in the March household? “I just wish I could marry Meg myself, and keep her safe in the family,” she says. The first volume ends with the family adjourning to the parlor, where they all sit and gaze sentimentally at the newly promised couple—all of them, that is, except Jo, who is thinking that maybe something will go wrong and they’ll break up. Now the curtain falls on the March girls, Alcott writes: “Whether it ever rises again, depends upon the reception given the first act of the domestic drama called Little Women.”
This sounds, now, as though she is teasing her readers, knowing full well that she will shortly receive huge bags of mail demanding that she get going on Part 2. In any case, that’s what happened, and the letter writers wanted to know one thing above all: Whom did the girls marry? Meg is taken, but what about Amy and Beth? Most important, what about Jo? Clearly, Jo had to marry Laurie. Everyone was crazy about her, so she had to be given the best, and wasn’t Laurie the best? He was handsome; he was rich; he spoke French; he loved her. In the final scene of Part 1, as everyone is cooing over Meg and John, Laurie, leaning over Jo’s chair, “smiled with his friendliest aspect, and nodded at her in the long glass which reflected them both.” They’re next, obviously.
Not so fast, Alcott wrote in a letter to a friend: “Jo should have remained a literary spinster but so many enthusiastic young ladies wrote to me clamorously demanding that she should marry Laurie, or somebody, that I didn’t dare refuse & out of perversity went & made a funny match for her.” Laurie, as Alcott has been telling us between the lines from the beginning, is a twit. Yes, he is handsome, and rich, but he is not a serious person. He does not, like Jo, think hard about things and fight his way through them in darkness.
So Jo does what she has long known she would have to do. She tells Laurie that she can’t love him otherwise than as a friend. She breaks his heart, insofar as a heart like his can be broken. Then, perhaps to relieve herself of guilt, she takes to thinking that Beth, her favorite sister, is in love with him. Beth has told Jo she has a secret, which she cannot tell her just yet. That must be the secret! That Beth loves Laurie! The thing for Jo to do, then, is to get out of the way. So she takes a job as governess to two children of one of her mother’s friends, who runs a boarding house in New York City.