Don’t dare belittle the Little Women!
Yes the March sisters are set on marriage and motherhood. But as critics gush over the SEVENTH film version, LIBBY PURVES says today’s sexually liberated young feminists can still take a leaf out of their book
WHAT do we know about modern women? Several things: we don’t like being belittled; we don’t like being defined simply as daughters, sisters, wives or mothers; we aren’t devoutly religious; and we think we are worth a few luxuries and an occasional pampering. Oh, and we’re keen on sexual freedom, too!
So why, again and again, do we fall with glee on Louisa May alcott’s novel Little Women, and its sequels including — gasp! — Good Wives?
Even the author herself, a peppy liberated feminist, anti-slavery campaigner, and civil war nurse, called the books ‘moral pap for the young...I plod away, though I don’t enjoy this kind of thing’.
the finished story about the four genteel young March sisters — motherly Meg, tomboy Jo, sweet, doomed Beth and vain amy — coming of age in reduced circumstances in New England during the american Civil War ‘reads better than I expected’, she said.
Which — given that the books are regarded as a semi-autobiographical account of alcott’s own experiences growing up as the second of four sisters in Concord, Massachusetts — should come as no surprise.
and she was certainly glad of the income her books generated, but shuddered at the ‘sweetness’ of the tales of marriage and motherhood.
Yet sometimes, ironically, a book knows more than its author does, or admits. So the affection for this united, idealistic family in the 1860s, with the nurturing matriarch Marmee and a devoted father, who lost all his money helping friends in debt and is now an army chaplain away at war, keeps drawing us back.
FANS have included the novelist anne tyler, the writer and film maker Nora Ephron, and feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. It isn’t just bonnet-nostalgia or even the yearning back to something honest, frugal and virtuous (Jo might grumble in the memorable opening line that ‘Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents’, but the sisters give away their Christmas breakfast to a poor family).
It is also the fact that somehow, across the yawning years, I believe that we can all find ourselves — or some aspect of ourselves — in those pages.
and it’s not just women, either: who can forget the glorious moment in the hit sitcom Friends, when dear, dim Joey is engrossed in the novel, and someone lets slip a terrifying spoiler so that his face crumbles with a cry of: ‘Whaaat? Beth dies?”.
Seven film adaptations have been made in the past century; the latest directed by Greta Gerwig has opened in the past week to starry reviews.
the Mail’s Brian Viner described it as a ‘ravishingly shot, exquisitely acted emotional rollercoaster that at times, I don’t mind admitting, didn’t just activate my tear ducts but had me gurning wildly to stop myself from blubbing audibly’.
It was, he added, ‘a bona fide treat for the whole family’.
It is the award-winning Irish actress, Saoirse Ronan (star of films such as atonement, Lady Bird and Mary Queen Of Scots) who gets the plum role of the clever, rebellious Jo who, for most fans, is at the heart of the book. Indeed, it was Gerwig’s ‘love affair’ with Jo as a character that she says prompted her to embark on her own interpretation.
Ronan follows, among others in that role, Ruby Miller, the famous ‘Gaiety Girl’ in that first silent film, Dorothy Bernard, Katharine hepburn, June allyson and Winona Ryder. (there has also been a play, an opera, a ballet, a Broadway musical, and even a bizarre Japanese interpretation called
Wakakusa no Yon Shimai or ‘Four Sisters of Young Grass’. and there have been many television series, both good and terrible. the BBC alone has done four.)
In the 1949 film, which is the version most of us of a certain age remember, Elizabeth taylor was pretty amy in one of her first